


a murderous desire (for love)

by singsongsung, sylwrites



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Colorado, F/M, Graduate School, Mentions of Murder & Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 13:19:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18262112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sylwrites/pseuds/sylwrites
Summary: The customer has set his bag on a chair and a laptop on the table, along with a couple books - library books, judging by the little white bands at the bottoms of their spines. He shoves his phone into the pocket of his jeans and moves toward the counter.“Hey,” he says, his eyes resting briefly on her face before darting up to the chalkboard menu. They’re very blue, his eyes.Denver, CO. Jughead is a grad student with a desperate desire for caffeine. Betty is a barista with a secret.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags! There is no violence depicted in this fic, but there are some discussions of violence.

Jughead has never been overly attached to the idea of fate. The whole thing just seems a little lazy, if he’s being honest: things are meant to be, so do whatever you want. Things are meant to be, so don’t worry about consequences. Things are meant to be, so don’t try.

It’s also a bit cruel, he thinks. Was his parents’ split and their mutual descent into patterns of alcohol and drug abuse meant to be? Was his and his sister’s pain and all of that childhood angst meant to be? Was the chaotic mess left behind by his father’s mistakes something that was preordained? Because if so - if the years he’d spent trying to pick up the pieces of other people’s lives were just time that was destined to be wasted, then really, that’s kind of shitty of the universe.

But right now, as Jughead turns the key into his new apartment in Denver, Colorado - a symbol of what he likes to think of as the rest of his life finally beginning - he can’t help but think that it must be at least a little bit of fate at play that the neighbourhood he’s moved to is also called Sunnyside.

It’s very different of course. This Sunnyside is on the north side of Denver, not the south, and while it’s not the nicest neighbourhood in the city, it still bears little resemblance to the faded trailer park of his youth, the glory years of which had been long gone by the time he’d lived there. His apartment in Denver is small but clean, with no sign of invading rodents and sparse but not overly worn furniture.

It’s not close to the university, exactly, but it’s along a good bus route, and that’s good enough for Jughead. He has to go to campus at least a few times a week for classes and meetings with the tired academic who’d agreed to be his supervisor for the Masters in Forensic Psychology program that he’d come to Colorado to complete.

The campus itself is nice. It’s interwoven with the city in some ways, with buildings across streets and beside offices and parks. There is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a decent amount of green space surrounding the university area; but of course, Denver’s situation near the grand nature of the Rockies is a draw in and of itself. Jughead wouldn’t exactly classify himself as outdoorsy, per se, but he’s willing to engage: Riverdale, for all of its faults, is a beautifully earthen place in the specific way that only upstate New York towns can be.

He’s moved here for a change - a new start, a turned page, a flipped leaf - after two years spent shepherding his younger sister Jellybean through her last years of high school. It’s the job of a parent, clearly, but the particular responsibilities that had come with having offspring had never been of much interest to theirs. It was a burden that Jughead had shouldered much of his life, one that he did not want his sister to have to deal with. So when his graduation from his bachelor’s program in New York City came on the same day that his father went to prison, Jughead had picked up his new life and moved back to sink into his old one in Riverdale.

But time, as the only sure thing in life, had indeed continued to pass, and Jellybean’s graduation eventually came. She’d obtained herself an acceptance letter to NYU, dyed her hair blue, and decided she wouldn’t look back - and so, neither would he.

In many ways, Jughead knows that his expectations for the life he could have in a new city, where nobody knows him and his responsibilities are only to himself, are going to be difficult to meet. But after twenty-some years of setting the bar low, he’s ready to try something different.

 

 

Jughead moves to Denver at the end of August. The weather, simply put, is nice: it’s warm but not oppressively so, and while his new home is definitely a large city, the mountains keep it from having the same heavy summer humidity that haunts New York. He decides that he likes it and spends a couple of weeks roaming around the city before school starts.

But inevitably, it does, and at the beginning of September Jughead starts taking the bus to campus every day for classes. He keeps taking it even on days when he doesn’t have class - he has to get the ball rolling on his thesis. He’s only on funding for so long, and even with the freelance website design work that he does on the side, he’s only going to be able to cash flow his life for so long. He can’t linger in this masters program for three years; he needs to get in, complete the work, and get a job - as what, he’s not exactly sure yet.

That he’s even permitted himself this two-year sidebar to complete another degree is something that Jughead counts as a personal, selfish win; he’s been dealing with family issues for so long, always watching out for and taking care of other people (even those who should have been taking care of _him_ ), and it feels nice to do something major that is only for his own future.

Unfortunately, Jughead is having a difficult time focusing anywhere on campus, no matter where he sets up shop. The library doesn’t have the right vibe, somehow. The Starbucks across the street from the business school is too crowded. Even a deserted hallway is not deserted enough, which Jughead finds out one Tuesday afternoon when a girl takes it upon herself to pace back and forth near where he’s working, speaking loudly on her cell phone to someone that Jughead can only imagine is her boyfriend.

“...Nick, are you fucking serious? I left them on your _nightstand,_ they didn’t just _walk away-”_

He stares at the research proposal on his screen: all six sentences of it.

“Those are my _mother’s_ earrings, Nick, for fuck’s sake. Look harder.”

Jughead closes his laptop morosely and picks up his cell phone. He shoots the pacing girl an annoyed look and dials his sister’s phone number. She doesn’t answer, and he didn’t have anything critical to say to her anyway, but the audible click signifying the forwarding of the call to her voicemail still stings. He knows, realistically, that Jellybean is just busy with school and friends and all of the new experiences that come with moving to a (much, much bigger) new city and starting college. She’s not purposely ignoring him. Probably.

He probably needs some friends, or something.

That, however, is a tall order. Jughead’s never been the kind of person that makes friends easily. Growing up, he had exactly one friend: Archie Andrews, whose role as the stereotypical high school football quarterback was second only to how effusively _nice_ he was. Even _then,_ Jughead is pretty sure that they were only friends because they were friends, in a manner of speaking: he doesn’t remember a time before Archie was in his life, and if they stay friends for the rest of it, it’ll probably mostly be because old friends are the only kind he knows how to have.

He stares at his cell phone for a moment while the girl finishes yelling at her boyfriend and finally leaves. Maybe he should sign up for Tinder, or something, he thinks. Not that romantic relationships have been any more successful an avenue for him than platonic ones. There have been a couple of girls, but nobody serious; trust is not a default position for him, and it’s been something of a roadblock for him in that arena.

Jughead shoves his laptop into his messenger bag and starts to make his way out of the building and toward the bus stop. He could try doing schoolwork at home again, but it hadn’t been very successful the first time: there are so many distractions, whether it be the internet or video games or even actual paying freelance design work. He needs a place that’s not too quiet and not too loud, not too busy and not too empty - and preferably one with a more steady supply of caffeine than whatever few beans are left in the bottom of the bag of dark roast he’d bought a week earlier.

Jellybean sends him a text when he’s on the bus back to his apartment. **_Sorry, was in class. I promise I’m still alive and not kicked out of school yet._**

 ** _Glad to hear my minimum criteria have been met,_** Jughead sends back. He watches the tree-lined streets pass until the buildings begin to look more familiar, then he stands and pushes the _next stop_ button.

But he’s not _that_ familiar with the route yet, and he gets off one stop too early. Jughead decides to just walk the short distance to his place instead of waiting for a new bus to take him just slightly closer, and as a consequence he ends up approaching from the south side of his block instead of the north.

This is less familiar, Jughead thinks. There’s a floral shop nearby that he hadn’t noticed. And then he makes a discovery: two commercial spaces over from the hardware store that he lives directly above, just around the corner from his building access door, is a coffee shop.

He pauses in front of the window. It looks nice inside: not overwhelmingly busy, but steady enough and with plenty of tables. He might be able to get some actual work done here.

 _Well,_ Jughead figures, pushing his way through the door, _worth a shot._

 

* * *

 

 

Betty is neatly arranging wooden stir sticks on the creamer-and-sweetener stand when the _ding-a-ling!_ of the bells attached to the door startles her faintly. The ripple that sound sends through her composure unnerves her more than the sound itself; for years, Betty has been so firmly unshakeable that she may as well be one of the mountains that thrusts their peaks into the Colorado sky. Betty doesn’t get _startled_ anymore. She doesn’t feel _skittish_. Those words belong to a version of herself that no longer exists.

It’s just the time of day, she tells herself, watching as the man who caused the bells to ring smiles very briefly and somewhat awkwardly in her direction while managing to never look directly at her. It’s the time of day: quarter to two in the afternoon, a point at which the coffee shop is usually deserted save for exactly two patrons: Dan, who is “writing a screenplay,” and Lydia, whose “daily constitutional” traces a path to the coffee shop and then home again. The morning regulars were in hours ago, the neighbourhood group of moms and babies in strollers came in at eleven, and the lunch rush has come and gone. In about an hour groups of teens will wander in, some wearing school uniforms, and order “frapps” that Betty has no real interest in making. But at this point in the afternoon, aside from occasionally offering Dan refills, she tends to be left alone with her thoughts.

“Smith,” a voice says gruffly, and her eyes dart over to the doorway that leads into the back room, where her boss, clad in his usual ridiculous outfit of a navy blue apron and a heavy leather jacket, is looking at her pointedly. “There’s a customer.”

Even though the customer in question can’t see her face, she pastes on her customer-service smile. “I’ve got it.”

“It’s your _job_ to ‘got it.’ So that _I_ don’t have to ‘got it.’”

She rolls her eyes, accustomed to his grumbling. “Is your blood sugar a little low, SP?” she asks, and steps behind the counter without waiting for a reply.

The customer has set his bag on a chair and a laptop on the table, along with a couple books - library books, judging by the little white bands at the bottoms of their spines. He shoves his phone into the pocket of his jeans and moves toward the counter.

“Hey,” he says, his eyes resting briefly on her face before darting up to the chalkboard menu. They’re very blue, his eyes.

“Hi,” Betty replies in her sunniest voice. “What can I get for you today?”

“Coffee,” he blurts. “Lots of coffee.”

The tightness of her smile decreases, just a little. “Lots of coffee is what we’ve got here,” she says, and even feels safe adding, “Our blonde roast is really good, if you’d like to try it,” given her relative confidence, from a first-glance judgment, that he’s not the kind of guy who would look her up and done in response and reply _oh, I_ bet _it is_.

And her judgment is right. He says, “Yeah, that sounds great. Large, please.”

She grabs a mug. “Anything else?”

“I’ll take…” He studies the display of baked goods for a moment. “A brownie.”

Betty extracts a brownie from the display case with tongs, sets it on a plate, and puts both the mug and the plate down on the counter before tapping several buttons on the touch screen propped above the register. “Four eighty, please.”

He pays with a five. When she gives him his change, he sets it directly into the tip jar. It’s only twenty cents, but she still appreciates the gesture.

“Have a good day,” Betty tells him, and finds that she sort of means it.

 

 

He comes into the coffee shop again a few days later.

Toni is at the register, and Betty is writing their updated autumn specials onto a chalkboard, adding red leaves in one of the upper corners and a plump pumpkin on the bottom right. This time of year always makes her feel wistful, nostalgic for something she never had. She can’t help but think of her first - and only - year at NYU, when she’d felt the autumn breeze in her bones like she never had before. Her memories taste like the sting of a pumpkin spiced beverage sipped before it was cool enough, like cheap vodka on her tongue prompting a wrinkled nose, like the plastic end of a pen absently nibbled upon; her memories sound like the crunch of leaves under boots, like the non-stop bustle of the city, like the page of a book being turned.

She felt like she had made it to a brand new beginning, back then. The world felt like her oyster. Her dreams bubbled up inside her and spilled out as questions in classes and laughter in hallways and whispers in dorm rooms.

The man asks Toni for an extra-large blonde roast.

“ _Ex_ tra large?” Toni asks as she pulls a to-go cup off a precariously balanced tower. “Busy day ahead?”

Betty chances a glance over at them in time to see him shrug as he says, “I hope so.”

She can’t help the smile that tugs at her lips. Like Toni, the repeat customer is dressed entirely in shades of black and grey. Like Toni, he’s pulled a beanie on over his hair today. Like Toni, there is something distinct about his posture that Betty can’t quite put a name to; he is unassuming, but there’s a strength there, ready to burst out if necessary.

“Your nectar of productivity,” Toni announces, handing over his cup of coffee.

He pays, dropping his change in the tip jar again, and heads straight for the door, making no detour for milk or sugar. It would seem that he takes his coffee black.

Toni sidles over toward Betty, one of her eyebrows perched high on her forehead. “He’s cute, huh?”

Betty throws her a look of good-natured exasperation. “Actually, I was just thinking about how you two were wearing the same outfit, so it sounds like you want me to tell you that _you’re_ cute.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that, B,” Toni volleys back playfully. “I know it.”

“Your girlfriend’s arrogance is rubbing off on you,” Betty tells her, not unkindly.

Their boss sticks his head out from the back room. “Did I hear something about rubbing off?”

Toni pretends to gag. “You disgust me, Sweet Pea.” She plucks up a tea bag - earl grey - and chucks it in his direction.

“Topaz!” he says, somewhere between a huff and a groan. “What kind of food safety - ”

“Obviously we’re not going to use it to _make tea_ now - ”

Betty tunes them out, turning her attention back to her sign and shading in her pumpkin with an orange stick of chalk. She wonders if the repeat customer is going to become a regular.

 

 

That evening, Betty’s phone rings, and she knows without having to check the caller ID that it’s her mother. Hardly anyone else ever calls her.

She starts the call with an apology instead of a greeting: “I’m sorry I didn’t call yesterday.”

“I worry about you, Elizabeth,” her mother says on a sigh. “You know that.”

“I do.” Betty thinks of her mother back in her hometown of Loveland, alone in the big house that she was forced to keep because they couldn’t get a single offer, not even way below market value. She doesn’t think that Alice does much in that house but worry.

“How are you, honey?”

“I’m good,” Betty says, hoping she sounds cheerful. “Things are pretty much the same. Work is busy. I’m planning a hike this weekend. My African violets are still alive.”

“Another hike by yourself?”

“I can take care of myself, Mom.”

“It just seems dangerous, Elizabeth. Anything could happen.”

Betty’s quiet for a moment, and then she says, trying to keep her voice steady, “I can’t live my life thinking about the things that could happen.”

It’s Alice turn to be silent, then, and Betty sits down on her sofa, curling up tightly in one of its corners. It’s still warm enough that one of her apartment windows is halfway open, but she finds that she feels cold all of a sudden.

“Have you heard from your sister?”

Betty squeezes her eyes shut. She hates that her mother always asks that question, and she hates the voice that it’s asked in even more. She used to think she hated her mother’s voice - how demanding it was, how expectant, how crisply it landed on each syllable of her name. But the voice that always asks after Polly, so brittle that it sounds on the verge of turning to dust, is so much worse.

“No,” she says. “I haven’t.” She hasn’t heard from her sister in more than five years, and she suspects she never will again. The last time she saw Polly, she knew her sister was lost, that she belonged to the cult. Polly’s eyes were full of bright hyper-focused intensity as she tried to convince Betty to join her, and turned misty, lost somewhere far away, when Betty had begun to sob and plead in spite of herself. Polly walked away in the long white dress reminiscent of a Victorian-era nightgown, and Betty watched her go, watched her beloved older sister turn into a ghost right before her eyes.

“Her birthday’s next month.”

Betty takes a deep breath, steeling herself. “Do you want me to come home? For her birthday?”

“Only if you have the time,” Alice says carefully. Once, that kind of phrase would’ve appeared early on in Alice Cooper’s master class in passive aggressive manipulation. Now, it sounds so much like she means it that Betty’s heart lurches in her chest.

“Of course I do. I’ll come home. We can make the funfetti cake Polly loved so much when we were kids.”

“Cake from a box,” Alice sighs, likely remembering Polly’s stubborn, childish insistence.

Betty bites her bottom lip and tells herself not to even think about crying. “I love you, Mom.”

She can hear the sad smile in Alice’s voice. “Oh, Betty. I love you, too.”

 

 

The repeat customer does indeed become a regular. He comes into the coffee shop on Tuesdays and Fridays for a few hours, and occasionally also stops by on other mornings to get a cup of coffee to go. Toni reports that he’s also become a Sunday regular, but Betty never sees him then, since it’s her day off - unless there’s a reason not to, she goes on long hikes on Sundays, revelling in the quiet and the solitude of the mountains and the forest, before returning home so tired and sweaty that when her head hits her pillow, her hair still damp from her shower, she falls instantly into a dreamless sleep.

Betty decides to introduce herself on a Friday. She knows him well enough now to start filling a cup with blonde roast the moment he walks through the door; she thinks they could stand to know one another’s names.

“Hi,” she says when he walks up to the counter, and notes the slight knot between his brows, the downward slump of his shoulders. “Long day?”

“More like a long night,” he says, wincing as he adjusts the strap of his messenger bag across his body, “which has lead into the long day.”

Betty offers him a sympathetic smile. “Do you want to try a new drink today?”

He eyes the cup she’d filled for him with something like longing. “I’m kind of a creature of habit.”

“I will still give you this very cup of coffee,” she promises. “I’ll just add a shot of espresso. It’s called a red eye. I find it helps on long days after long nights.”

He nods slowly, and the corners of his mouth curl upward - not quite a smile, but getting there. “Alright. I’ll try it.”

Betty adds the shot of espresso and slides the cup over the counter toward him. He picks it up, blows on the liquid to cool it, and then takes a drink.

“Thoughts?” she asks.

“I think you just saved my day,” he says. “And possibly my life.”

A flush heats the apples of her cheeks. “Well, as payment, I’ll accept three twenty-five and your name.”

“I’m Jughead,” he says, fishing change out of his pocket. “Guess I should’ve told you that a week or two ago.” He must catch the confusion that flits over her face because he sighs and adds, “It’s a long story.”

Betty’s mouth feels dry; she slides her tongue along her bottom lip. “I know a thing or two about long stories,” she says. “Nice to meet you, officially, Jughead. I’m Betty.”

“Nice to meet you, too, Betty.” He lifts his cup. “Thank you for this.”

“Anytime. You know where to find us.”

This time, the curve of his mouth forms a full, real smile. “I think I could walk here in my sleep at this point.”

“We’ll give you something to wake you up if you do,” she says, and he chuckles, and she finds herself laughing, and it’s the kind of rapport she’s not sure she’s ever allowed herself with a customer before.

She can feel the weight of Toni’s gaze on her back, the pressure of questions her friend and coworker wants to ask. Betty doesn’t want to answer them, so she busies herself with rearranging muffins in the display case, and soon enough Toni huffs and leaves to retrieve a new bag of coffee beans.

 

 

The Friday after she learns his name, Jughead spends the afternoon at the coffee shop, hunched over his computer, releasing sighs between bursts of typing. Betty doesn’t have much to do besides wiping down steam wands and neatly stacking boxes of herbal tea, so she notices when he absently reaches for his cup, only to pause before bringing it to his mouth, staring down into it with faint disappointment. She imagines this is his response to finding it empty, so when he looks toward the counter, she lifts a coffeepot, wordlessly offering him a refill. He nods, throwing her a grateful smile.

Because of the way he’s positioned himself at his table, she approaches him from behind. A natural curiosity prompts her to glance at his computer screen; given the intensity of his concentration, she expects to see spreadsheets or coding or some other jargon she doesn’t understand.

That’s not what she sees. What she sees has her grip on the coffeepot slipping, and it almost falls to the floor.

Jughead is reading an article, the title of which is visible at the top of his screen.

_A Murder ‘Wave’? Trends in American Serial Homicide._

Serial killers.

Betty’s heart stutters like it’s forgotten how to beat.

 

 

tbc.


	2. Chapter 2

_Can you hear the road from this place?_  
_Can you hear footsteps? Voices?_  
_Can you see the blood on my sleeve?_

 

Jughead’s fingers fly across the keyboard as he taps out his thoughts on one of the articles he’s preparing for class. He pauses, reaches for a sip of coffee, and then resumes writing, trying to record his first impressions before they leave him. As he drops his forehead toward the screen again, the flexible rubber headband of his headphones slips slightly. Fortunately, the smooth fabric covering the speaker elements remains pressed against his ears, keeping the contrasting audible highs and lows of Frightened Rabbit playing in his head, so Jughead waits a moment to finish his sentence before stopping to readjust.

He’s tried to work without music, but despite the specificity in his need for the proper surroundings - not too crowded, not too empty, not too much light - silence has always proved to bear little fruit. Noise is something that Jughead can handle, and even better if it’s a noise that he’s brought to himself in the form of albums or podcasts. A controlled distraction, he’s found, seems to create just the right amount of predictability for a productive environment.

While his undergraduate degree may have only included a minor in psychology, Jughead’s taken enough classes to know that there’s definitely something telling about how much he, a child born and raised in something of an organized chaos, appreciates a semblance of order.

Of course, he’s not in Denver getting a Masters in Forensic Psychology for therapeutic purposes - not entirely, anyway. No; somehow, the escapist literature dreams of a trailer park kid had turned toward an academic interest in violence. It had happened somewhere around the second term of his first year of undergrad, when he’d finished _In Cold Blood_ and picked up _The Killer Inside Me._ The story of Lou Ford and his secret but increasingly uncontrollable sexually depraved and murderous urges had captured him in a way that no book had for years; he still remembers sitting on the train on the way home, pulling up his course schedule on his phone and trading an economics class for Intro to Psychology.

It was only two years and half a degree later, when Jughead’s father was arrested _again,_ (and had failed to inform his son of this fact until ultimately his daughter, Jughead’s little sister, had to share the news) that Jughead was finally able to admit - or at least recognize - that at least part of the reason that Ford’s Andy Griffith-esque exterior and depraved, twisted truer self had so drawn him in was because he seemed, in many devastating ways, _so_ familiar.

Perhaps he _could_ use a little therapy, Jughead thinks, as he drains the remainder of his coffee into his throat and sets the empty mug down on what’s quickly become ‘his’ table. He stares morosely at his still-incomplete homework. It’s interesting stuff, the ground that they’re covering in his seminar, and he enjoys the engagement that comes with class, but the preparation that he strives for can be a bit tedious at times.

Jughead reaches up to adjust his headphones again, but just as Scott Hutchison’s thick Scottish accent sings, _“I have fallen in the forest, did you hear me?”_ , there’s a tap on his shoulder that makes him nearly jump out of his skin.

It’s Betty, his favourite barista at what is now officially his favourite coffee shop, which is amusingly named ‘Shots! (Of Espresso)’. Betty’s not his favourite just because she’s pretty - though she is undeniably that - but because she makes a killer red eye, always seems to know _precisely_ when he needs a refill, and she seems _interesting._

Jughead’s known a lot of different kinds of people over his life, from both of his parents’ various forays into miscellaneous criminal activity, his time in New York, and the years he spent dealing with keeping his little sister out of the foster care system. He’s also always been a fairly observant person - the result of a life spent carefully engaging on some things and very intentionally avoiding others, probably - and between those two things, he’s developed a pretty good ability to read people. No one is as mysterious as they think they are, he’s learned.

But _her,_ this woman - Betty - he can’t get a proper read on her. He’s been coming here for almost two months now, and all that he knows about her is that she works here, is probably about his age, is smart and well-read (he’d made a fairly obscure literature reference in one of their early interactions, which is an admittedly pretentious habit that he’s been trying to cure himself of), and that based on his stomach’s reaction whenever she smiles at him, he might have the tiniest bit of a crush on her.

 _God,_ he hopes she isn’t a Republican.

“More coffee?” Betty asks, gesturing kindly to the pot in her hand.

“Yeah, definitely.” Jughead pushes the mug at her and quickly sweeps a dog-eared copy of _Criminal Psychology_ into his messenger bag. He’d noticed her staring a few times at some of his more aggressively titled materials and had decided that he’d try to keep the high points of his work’s relatively dark subject matter somewhat under wraps.

Not that Jughead is hoping for or expecting anything from her - it’s her job to be nice to him, and he’s not stupid enough to confuse her politeness for any kind of interest - but she does seem to not be totally repelled by him, and given that he’s sort of in the market for friends, he figures not totally alienating her is probably a good first step. After all, the psychology of serial killers isn’t exactly lighthearted conversation material.

“I swear, you must have these cups microchipped or something,” Jughead says, feeling oddly nervous as he watches Betty fill his mug. “You always seem to know exactly when it’s almost empty.”

Betty gives him an amused smile. “The cups are just normal,” she promises, placing his now-full mug back on the table. She begins to walk away, but then stops after a few steps and briefly looks back at him with a friendly but mischievous grin. “Maybe it’s _you_ I have microchipped,” she jokes.

Jughead chuckles. “I don’t think I mind,” he replies, only realizing how flirtatious his words had sounded when Betty’s cheeks flush and she dips back behind the counter.

He can almost hear Jellybean’s voice in his head. _Don’t be fucking weird, Jughead._

He turns back to his articles and lifts the headphones back onto his head, trying once more to get in the zone to focus. It mostly works, but every now and then a blonde ponytail pops into view above his laptop screen, and his skin feels warm.

 

 

Shots! (Of Espresso) does serve food, but it’s dainties-and-sandwiches fare rather than burgers or more substantial options, so Jughead generally doesn’t eat dinner there. It closes at eight, so on the days that he chooses to work at the cafe - which had begun as once a week at the end of September and quickly progressed to four or five times by the end of October - he usually leaves at seven to grab food before going home and doing some actual paying web design work.

For that, too, there are options: within reasonable walking distance, there’s a McDonald’s, a Subway, and several questionable Vietnamese restaurants. If he’s feeling ambitious, there’s also his actual groceries, most of which are of the frozen or non-perishable variety.

Sometimes, though, he ends up staying at the coffee shop until closing, at which point one of the staff - sometimes Betty, sometimes one of her coworkers, and sometimes the somewhat surly owner - has to tell him to leave. When it’s Betty, she occasionally offers him one of the remaining premade sandwiches, but he always declines; Jughead knows how these places can work, and he doesn’t want her to get in trouble.

The Friday after Halloween is one such night. He’s knee-deep in some design work for a change, building a site for a fledgling cupcake business. His client has requested that the site make her seem “grounded but ethereal”, and like she “cares a lot but not too much”, which Jughead finds both stupid and frustrating. He loves cupcakes. He _knows_ cupcakes. He’s pretty sure the only thing people want to find is photos and flavours.

He’s in the middle of trying to write a script that will make the navigation panel look like a flower crown (another absurd and nearly inexplicable request, but hey, she’s paying him) when Betty approaches and gently reminds him of their hours.

“Oh shit,” he swears, glancing at his phone. “I didn’t realize it was past eight. Sorry, I promise I’m leaving.”

Betty smiles politely. “It’s okay, no rush,” she assures him. “I’ve still got to take down all the fake cobwebs from the windows, so you’ve got a little time before I kick you out.”

Jughead exhales, a little relieved. He’s pretty close to making the script work, and a few more minutes just might let him finish the job. “Thanks, Betty.”

“No problem.” She heads back toward the counter, then pauses. “I locked the doors, though, so I’ll need to let you out.”

“Noted.”

Betty disappears behind the counter and is gone for a few minutes. In that time, Jughead returns to his laptop, stopping only when he hears his name being called.

“Jughead? There’s a leftover ham and swiss, if you’re interested.”

He shakes his head at her, and as always, declines. She nods her understanding and leaves his line of sight again. Jughead finishes the line he’s writing and decides to leave testing it for at home. He puts his computer away in his bag and starts to gather the rest of his stuff. It’s mostly papers and a couple of books, so it doesn’t take too long, and when he’s ready to go he looks around for Betty to unlock the door for him.

He finds her on the other side of the cafe, standing on top of a chair and reaching for a lump of faux-cobwebs that’s been attached to the top of one of the exterior windows. She’s facing away from him and is humming to herself quietly as she works.

Jughead stands a few feet away, feeling awkward. The purchase of her feet on the chair looks precarious, and he considers briefly if he should offer to help before wondering whether that would come off as nice or creepy. Before he can make a decision, Betty steps down, turns, and notices him.

“Ready to go?” she asks.

She’s rid herself of the branded apron that she and the other baristas usually wear, and it surprises him. He finds himself staring at the inch-wide gap of skin that’s exposed between her jeans and where her sweater has ridden up.

“Uh, yeah,” he stammers, dragging his eyes away and feeling his face heat up. Clearly, if he’s being undone by a partial sighting of _waist_ , then he needs to get a hold of himself.

Betty leads him to the exit and flips the lock open. She pushes the door open and holds it with one hand, stepping to the side to allow him to pass by. “I’m sure I’ll see you again,” she tells him. “Have a good night.”

Jughead nods and leaves quickly, not wanting to linger and be weirder than he’s sure he’s already been. He crosses the street with the intention of grabbing a Coke from the nearby convenience store, and by the time he’s procured it, the lights in the cafe are dark.

 

 

The next day, Jughead wakes up with what he’s sure must be either the black death or a terrible head cold. His brain feels like it’s in a fog, one that not even his trusty caffeine addiction can clear, so he staggers to the bathroom and downs a Sudafed before collapsing back into bed. There’s a text from Jellybean waiting on his phone indicating that she’s _**still alive, Jug, I’ll call you tomorrow,**_ and with that slight relief in his mind, he falls asleep again.

When he awakens again, he finds that the Sudafed has been marginally effective at best. His head still hurts, his nose is still heavy, and his throat still feels like it’s made of knives. He _is_ kind of hungry, which Jughead realizes is probably a decent sign, so he spends ten minutes on Postmates trying to find a place that will deliver soup at ten in the morning. It proves more challenging that he’d expected, and for a brief moment he considers wandering downstairs and down the street to Shots!, which doesn’t have soup but _does_ have an endless supply of other warm liquids.

He decides against it, deciding that that isn’t exactly in the interests of public health. A pang of disappointment comes next as Jughead realizes that he won’t be seeing his favourite barista today. Of course, it’s always possible that she wasn’t even scheduled to work: it _is_ Saturday, after all, and he’s pretty sure she’s full-time weekdays, but he’s seen her doing overtime shifts on weekends before.

He wonders if Betty has roommates to keep the cost of living down and wrinkles his nose at the idea that perhaps one of them is a boyfriend. He doesn’t _think_ she has one, but he supposes that it’s very possible: he knows almost nothing about her, nor she about him.

Eventually, Jughead finds a place willing to sell him pho in the morning, and he puts an order in. While he waits for it to arrive, he makes himself a terrible cup of instant coffee and pulls out his laptop again. The night before, he’d received a file full of photos to upload to the website that he’s building, including a new (ugly) logo that his bakery client’s friend had apparently made. It also includes a flower crown, this time hovering over a cupcake like a halo, and it looks terrible. He’s pretty sure that it comes across as neither ethereal nor grounded, and he sends a gently probing email to his client to see whether she’d be willing to reconsider the choice.

 

 

His cold leaves nearly as quickly as it had come, but he doesn’t venture out to the public for a couple of more days anyway, just in case he’s still contagious. He misses class on Monday but heads back for Tuesday’s seminar, partly because he’s feeling a lot better and partly because he’s going a little stir crazy.

On the way to the bus, he stops at Shots! for a real coffee. Betty isn’t there; instead, it’s a barista named Toni, who Jughead has encountered before. She dresses in a lot of plaid, which Jughead can appreciate, and has an attitude that Jughead can inexplicably identify with. In every way that Betty is a mystery to him, Toni is not: he’d taken one look at her and felt instantly like he knew her.

The feeling seems to be mutual. Toni doesn’t usually give him the fake-polite voice that she uses for the other customers, instead taking his order with an almost sarcastic expression and then handing him the cup with the kind of practiced disinterest that he respects.

Today, though, she hangs onto the cup. “You sound sick,” she states of matter-of-factly.

Jughead nods and reaches for his coffee. “Yeah, I’m getting over a cold,” he says impatiently.

Toni tilts her head and looks amused. “Interesting,” she says. “Very interesting.”

He frowns at her. “What?”

“No - _thi -ing,”_ she says, somehow turning two syllables into three. “Betty catches a cold, and now her favourite customer is sick, too. Just interesting, that’s all.”

Jughead rolls his eyes and snatches the cup from her. “I don’t know what that’s supposed to imply.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

“She serves me coffee.”

“She’s pretty, isn’t she?” Toni presses in a teasing tone. “Not my type, but definitely yours, right?”

Jughead glares at her. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he states. He adjusts his bag over his shoulder.

Toni’s eyes twinkle mischievously. “She’s back to work tomorrow. I’ll be sure to tell her you stopped by.”

He shakes his head and walks away, trying to look exasperated while secretly feeling pleased. _Her favourite customer,_ he thinks. Now _that_ he thinks is interesting.

 

* * *

 

Betty arrives at work a full twenty minutes before the coffee shop opens on Wednesday, having randomly managed to catch an earlier bus than she usually does. She still has a persistent tickle in her throat, but aside from that, the symptoms of her cold are abating, and she no longer considers herself a walking congregation of germs. It’s almost unspeakably pleasant to finally be able to breathe through at least _one_ of her nostrils again.

Sweet Pea is behind the counter when she arrives, scooping coffee grounds, and Betty inhales the sweet scents of caffeine and slowly-warming loaves of banana bread as she nudges the door closed behind her with a foot. A “Hey!” greets her, much warmer than any greeting Sweet Pea has probably ever given, which alerts her to the fact that Fangs is also there, straddling a chair and resting his arms along the top of its backrest.

“Hey,” Betty replies, plucking her hat from her head and shaking snowflakes off of it.

“Pea said you were sick,” Fangs says. “Feeling better?”

“Yeah, thanks. Much better. How are you?” Betty asks, wrestling a little with her crossbody bag as she tries to pull it out from beneath the loops of her scarf. “I haven’t seen you in a little bit.”

“He’s busy saving the children,” Sweet Pea says without turning around, but the dryness in his tone doesn’t reach the pride that bubbles to the surface.

Fangs grins - he hears that pride, too. “It’s been really busy at the legal clinic,” he explains to Betty. “I’ve been - ” He stops abruptly, his eyes narrowing.

“What?” she asks, lifting a hand to her hair self-consciously. “Am I all staticky?”

“No,” Fangs says. “Are you wearing _makeup_?”

She tucks a lock of hair that’s fallen out of her ponytail back behind her ear. “Yes. Stop looking at me like that.”

Unsurprisingly, he keeps staring at her like she’s some great mystery. “I don’t think I’ve _ever_ seen you wear makeup.”

“I wear makeup,” Betty says, in a tone far too defensive than this conversation warrants.

“You do not,” Fangs says, with authority. “You basically never wear makeup. Pea, why is Betty wearing makeup?”

Sweet Pea looks over his shoulder at them - first at Betty, and then at his boyfriend - and shrugs. “How should I know?”

“I’m getting over a cold,” Betty reminds them, flustered by the attention. “I didn’t want to scare away customers with my bright red nose.”

“No,” Fangs says, with a slow shake of his head. “No, that’s not it.”

Betty gives her eyes a roll, as if that will prove that Fangs is ridiculous. “I need to get ready for my shift,” she says, moving toward the back room.

“Yeah, stop harassing my employee, Francis,” Sweet Pea says, and Betty ducks past him and out of the conversation.

It’s only seconds later, however, that the bells above the door chime, signalling a new arrival, and she hear Fangs say: “Toni! Why is Betty wearing makeup?”

She sighs, trying her apron strings behind her hips. It’s starting to look like the day will be a long one.

 

 

Jughead arrives just after the stragglers from the morning rush are making their way out. He’s wearing his beanie, and the skin around his eyes is a faded, almost-unnoticeable purple. Betty recognizes the redness at the corners of his nose and feels a rush of sympathy. She takes a to-go cup off the stack at her elbow as he approaches the counter.

“Hey,” she says, at the exact same time he does, their voice blending together. It surprises a short, quiet laugh out of her.

“How are you?” he asks. “Toni said you were sick.”

Betty’s eyebrows pull together. “She said that?” She resists the urge to look in Toni’s direction.

“Only because I was sick, too,” Jughead says, in something of a rush. “Not - she didn’t say it just to make conversation.”

“Right.” She smiles at him, hoping it will ease some of the faint creases that have worked their way onto his face. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, it was just a cold,” he says, waving a hand through the air like her question wasn’t needed - like he and his cold aren’t worth the slightest bit of concern, not even the amount of a concern in a simple, polite question.

“Same for me,” Betty says, her mind still lingering on the way his palm had pushed aside her words. “How about a London Fog today?”

Jughead’s lips tip up at the corners with an ease that causes something warm to burst in Betty’s stomach, just below her ribs. The worried creases on his face disappear, replaced by smile lines. “Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.”

“Coming right up,” she says, inputting his total into the debit machine and then handing it across the counter so that he can tap his card. She grabs a bag of earl grey tea and gets to work making his drink.

When she slides the steaming cup across the counter to him, he reaches for it before she’s let go, and their fingers brush. “Thanks, Betty,” he says. “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“Yeah?” she asks. She presses her hands, suddenly moist with sweat, against her apron, and tilts her head. Flirting feels foreign, somehow, but she’s been flexing those long-used muscles with him for a few weeks now. “Did you miss me? Or just my coffee?”

The look on his face is nearly magical, something dancing through his eyes like snowflakes being swept through the air by the wind. “I missed your red eyes,” he says. “And your green eyes.”

Betty’s cheeks go hot, and she doesn’t need a mirror to know that they’re flushing a much darker pink than that of the blush she applied in the morning.

 

 

Toni is at her side the instant Jughead disappears from the view of Shots!’s large windows. “So today’s makeover _was_ for broody book boy,” she says smugly. “I knew it.”

Her tone does absolutely nothing to help Betty’s cheeks cool down. “It wasn’t _for_ him,” she says, even though the gloss sticky on her lips makes that feel like a fib. “I’ve just - I’ve been… feeling a little different. Lately. And with him.”

The triumphant gleam fades out of Toni’s eyes fairly quickly, replaced by something softer and more thoughtful. “Good different?” she asks gently.

“Yeah.” Betty nods once, firmly. “I mean, it’s - it’s probably nothing and it’s probably going absolutely nowhere but - ”

“Hey, don’t say that,” Toni protests, covering the hand that Betty’s resting on the countertop with one of her own. “It’s not nothing. Even if it’s _nothing_ with Nerdy McEmo, and no one gets laid, it’s not nothing for you.”

Betty slides a glance over at her. She’s not sure she likes what Toni is saying to her - it’s the right thing to say, maybe even the _exact_ right thing to say. And she’s not sure she likes the way Toni’s looking at her, it’s too _knowing_ , it’s too -

Toni’s hand tightens around hers and she says, “ _Hey_. B.” Each syllable is a demand, an arm reaching into the abyss and yanking Betty back into reality, once and then twice, reminding her of where she is and who she is and that it’s alright. When she sees that Betty’s no longer spiralling, Toni adds, “She’d never tell me anything. You know that. You’re my friend, too. I want you to be good. And I want you to get some.”

Betty’s supposed to smile at that, she knows, and Toni’s hip bumping against hers provides an extra, helpful prompt, but she can’t quite manage it. Thankfully, she’s saved by the jingle of the bells above the door, and the ever-conspicuous entrance of Cheryl Blossom.

“Speak of the devil and she doth appear,” she murmurs under her breath. A crooked little smile has taken up residence on Toni’s face, making her appear younger than she is.

“T.T.!” Cheryl calls brightly. Her wool coat is a deep red that matches her lipstick perfectly. “And Betty.”

“Hey, babe,” Toni says, and Betty adds, “Hi, Cheryl. Hazelnut latte?”

“Yes, darling, thank you,” Cheryl says, removing her white leather gloves and leaning across the counter to give Toni a kiss.

“I didn’t think I’d see you today,” Toni says, pulling back with a wash of scarlet on her lips.

“I had to pick up new flowers for the Thanksgiving table; the ones I ordered are awful. So I thought I’d come see my girls.” Cheryl rests a hip against the countertop. “The invitation is still open, Betty,” she says, raising her voice a bit to make sure she’s heard. “I’ve made you a place card.”

Betty turns around with a small smile and Cheryl’s frothy latte in hand. “I appreciate that,” she says earnestly. “But I already told Sweet Pea I’d work Thanksgiving Day.”

One of Cheryl’s red lips juts outward in protest. “Isn’t that _illegal_?”

Betty’s smile stretches a little. “I’ll get holiday pay, don’t worry.”

“B’s going to provide hot drinks to all the lonely souls on Thanksgiving,” Toni says. “One lonely soul in particular, if she’s lucky.”

“Oh?” Cheryl asks, her eyebrows arching.

Betty shoots Toni a silencing look before she can reply. “Can you _please_ at least stop discussing this in my presence?”

Toni laughs. “I’ll fill you in later,” she promises Cheryl.

“I know you will,” Cheryl replies, leaning in for a farewell kiss. She slides a five dollar bill across the counter, places a ten in the tip jar, and then heads for the door in a whirl of red hair and the spicy scent of her perfume.

“She has to stop leaving me pity tips,” Betty sighs, eyeing the ten dollar bill resting atop of the change in the tip jar.

“One of Cher’s love languages is money,” Toni says with a shrug. “And she does love you. Are you sure you won’t reconsider Thanksgiving dinner? I promise to behave.”

“I’m okay with working it,” Betty tells her. “Really. But thank you, T.”

“You’re always welcome at our place,” Toni says simply, and heads off to refill the creamers and milks.

 

 

Thanksgiving is predictably quiet. A few people come in for coffee, but no one stays. Betty wipes down all the windows and organizes boxes of tea bags but otherwise spends her day perched on a stool behind the counter, bent over a copy of Michelle Obama’s autobiography.

Around seven, when the world is dark outside save for the glow of streetlights and Betty’s just stood up and raised her arms over her head, stretching out her muscles, the door swings open and admits a familiar figure: dark grey sherpa jacket that can’t possibly be warm enough for the weather, a beanie atop hair that may or may not have been brushed in the morning, a messenger bag banging lightly against a hip. Something inside Betty says _there you are_ , like she’d been expecting him all day without realizing it.

“Hey, Jughead,” she says.

“Hey,” he replies, moving through the coffee shop and setting his bag down on a chair close to the counter. “I’ve been on campus all day; I didn’t think you guys would be open.”

She shrugs. “There’s always someone in need of coffee.”

“Embroider that on a pillow,” he says with a nod of agreement.

Betty has to bite her bottom lip to keep her smile from turning into a grin. “Can I get you a cup?”

“I’m trying to go to sleep at a reasonable time tonight, so maybe a tea. You have herbal, right?”

She nods. “There are a few flavours - ”

“Surprise me,” he says. “I trust you.”

“Okay,” she says, and picks a mug up off the shelf. She picks her favourite for him, a flavour called Apple Orchard.

“Hey, Betty?” When she turns toward him, keeping one eye on the boiling water running into the mug, he asks, “Think you could have a cup with me?”

She follows his gaze as it moves around the coffee shop - they’re alone, and considering how quiet the street is outside, that’s unlikely to change. Still, she hesitates. “I should be taking decor down,” she says. “All the turkeys and autumn colours have to go, and it’s supposed to look like a non-denominational festive wonderland in here tomorrow morning.”

“How about we compromise? You make yourself some tea, and I’ll help you un-decorate.”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to - ”

“You didn’t ask. I offered.”

She studies him for a beat. She’s been enjoying the rapport they’ve built, but she wonders sometimes if its flirtatious undertones are all in her head. She talks to Jughead a few times per day at most, and there’s almost always some transactional element to the conversation, some reference to coffee or croissants or chicken salad sandwiches. She doesn’t really know him, and he doesn’t really know her. She can’t be sure of his intentions - she learned the hard way that you can never really be sure of _anyone’s_ intentions.

But he did offer, and he does seem to want to spend time with her, and maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing to just believe the words he’s saying.

“Okay,” she tells him. “I’ll make some tea. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he says, and while the tea steeps she leads him into the back room so that he can help her get the step ladder.

 

 

Standing on a chair and the step ladder, respectively, Betty and Jughead remove the garland of faux leaves in alternating burnt oranges and reds from above the shop’s front windows. The wind is shaking the leaves on the trees outside, but Betty feels downright toasty - perhaps thanks to the cup of tea she recently drank, or maybe thanks to the small table she’d sat at with Jughead as she did so, the mere inch of air between their knees feeling charged with electricity.

“This is very… charming decor for a man like your boss,” Jughead says as he removes a chubby, jolly-looking turkey made of paper from the shelf that houses bags of beans for sale.

“Most of it may have been my idea,” Betty admits. “The customers like it, so he doesn’t complain.”

Jughead smiles at that, handing the turkey down to her. “How long have you worked here?”

She thinks about it for a moment. “About five years now.”

“Really?” he asks, lowering himself back to the ground. “And you like it?”

Betty tilts an eyebrow up. “You mean, was it always my dream to spend five years of my life working as a barista? No, it wasn’t.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he says. There is a gentleness in his voice that should calm her, but it sets her on edge instead; she can’t find it in herself to believe him, not completely.

“I went to college,” she says. “For a year. It didn’t work out.”

“What’d you study?”

“English lit.” She’d loved to read so much, once. Books meant something to her, something profound, and she’d been so keen to take courses and talk about that profound thing with similarly enchanted students. She still reads, but not like she used to. The escape books used to offer her doesn’t engulf her anymore. She lives somewhere that fantasy cannot reach.

“Really?” Jughead asks, his eyes bright. “Me, too.”

“Really?” Betty echoes. She places the last of the Thanksgiving decorations in their box, ready to be stored for another year. “But… I’ve seen your books. It’s all… psychology of violence, criminal behaviour.”

“Yeah,” he says. He looks embarrassed, though she doesn’t know if he’s reacting to her noticing, or the subject matter she’s noticed. “I minored in psychology, and that’s what I’m doing now - forensic psychology - but I got a literature degree from NYU.”

She goes still, a garland of tiny snowmen in her hands. “You went to NYU?”

Jughead nods. “Yeah. I’m from New York. Upstate.”

It takes a lot of effort not to crumple the snowmen between her clenched fingers. “I did, too. I went to NYU.”

His eyes are wide beneath the curls of hair that keep drifting over his forehead, threatening to obstruct his vision. “What year?”

“I left in 2020.”

“I was there, too, then.” He breathes a laugh. “Wow. We might’ve even had classes together.”

“We might’ve,” Betty agrees softly. She’s silent as she lets that realization sink into the air around them, and then, before he can ask her any questions - like why she left - she poses one to him instead: “Is that why you didn’t go home for Thanksgiving? Because it’s far?”

He takes one end of the snowman garland from her. “Something like that.”

“It’s nice to have your help tonight,” she tells him. She sounds shy even to her own ears. “And your company.”

“It’s nice for me, too,” he says. “I figured I’d be spending a lot of holidays alone here.”

He climbs onto the ladder, and Betty onto the chair she’s using as a step stool. She hooks her end of the garland into place and, without an uncharacteristic lack of preparation or contemplation, takes an impulsive leap as she says, “You know, I’m here on Christmas, too. Not _here_ -here - Sweet Pea closes on Christmas Day. But I’m here, in the city, so if you wanted to… decorate something else or get some takeout or - or I don’t mind cooking, even - ”

“I’d be happy to decorate with you again,” Jughead says, and her heart begins to soar - “But I already have my ticket home for the holidays.”

“Oh.” Betty blinks, her heart crashing painfully back between her ribs. “Of course you do. Sorry.”

“Hey, don’t apologize,” he says quickly, reaching across the space between them to touch her arm. “You offered to make me dinner; that’s not something to apologize for, believe me. If I was around, I’d definitely say yes. It’s just, my family - ”

She pulls her arm away from his touch, her feet moving precariously close to the edge of her chair. “I understand, Jughead; don’t worry. Of course you should be with your family,” she says, and means it. He should be with his family. Normal people spend the holidays with their families. Normal people don’t have mothers who take off to spend seven days in a Canadian spa on the twentieth of every December. Normal people don’t spend Christmas morning crying when they make too much hot chocolate out of habit.

“Betty,” he says, in a voice so soft it hurts, a knife in tender skin.

She shakes her head, getting down off of her chair and crossing her arms over her chest. She feels like an idiot for assuming he was just as alone as she is. Of course he’s not, and now she’s made the pathetic reality of her life obvious to him. “Thanks very much for your help, but I can finish this up by myself. You should go home and get some sleep, like you said.”

Jughead gets down off the ladder. “I can finish with you.”

“No - it’s my job, not yours. I’ve done it by myself for five years. I can do it by myself tonight.”

He looks like he wants to protest. Betty keeps her arms firmly crossed and fixes her eyes on the floor until he sighs and says, “Okay.”

“Goodnight,” she says, lifting her gaze and pulling up her customer service smile.

He looks hurt, which she doesn’t feel is fair. She’s the one who offered herself and the facts of her life to him; she’s the one who was rejected like the end-of-night sandwiches she so often tries to get him to accept. She’s the one who feels deeply embarrassed by her lipstick and mascara and her stupid attempt to connect when she should know, by now, that she’s no longer meant for connecting.

“Goodnight,” he tells her finally, and he opens and closes the door so carefully that she hardly hears the bells.

 

 

tbc.


	3. Chapter 3

Jughead’s life has been full of clichés.

He was born to troubled parents on the bad side of the tracks. He’d been the prompt for their marriage in the first place, and since that’s always a promising basis for a strong marriage, he’d also watched that marriage dissolve spectacularly. The adults he’d been raised around for the most part have names that are just regular nouns. His father is in a gang. _He_ was almost in a gang. He’d been taught to carry a knife in his shoe before he’d been taught how to do long division. He has one parent in the wind and one in prison and a little sister who’d fought a multi-year nutritional deficiency as a direct result of the negligence of those parents. He rides a motorcycle. He has trust issues. He has abandonment issues. His issues have issues.

All he needs is a series of bad tattoos and a smoking habit and he may as well be living inside of a bad novel.

And yet, sometimes, Jughead finds himself drawn to further clichés. It is perhaps part of why he’d felt the strange pull of the maddeningly trite Lou Ford while reading the book that started it all. More assuredly, it is _definitely_ why right now, as he sits in his rental car outside of the state penitentiary in Cañon City, the only thing that Jughead can think of is Nietzsche’s infamous quotation from _Beyond Good and Evil_ : ‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you’. It seems to be commonplace in any semi-public discussion of serialized violence, whether fatal or not, and finally, Jughead understands why: because monsters, he’s learning, are real.

 

 

It starts at the beginning of December.

Jughead has been having a bad week. Snow is threatening, and while he’d not been stupid enough to think that moving to _Colorado_ would preclude him from having to deal with winter, he’s still not prepared to put his bike in storage for the season. Other than being his primary mode of transport outside of the bus, his bike is how he blows off steam. On difficult days, on stressful days, on heavy days, and even on days when he just feels like it (the audacity of _that,_ he can’t help but think, he’s doing what he wants _just because),_ he can hop on his bike and just … go. It turns his mind blank, smooths the pathways in his brain, makes the world one colour. And in winter, the ease of that disappears.

Other than the ongoing spectre of winter, Jughead’s been having difficulty at school with his research supervisor. He’s been trying to get his sample questionnaire approved and through to the ethics board so that he can begin scheduling interviews with his subjects - who are, incidentally, perpetrators of violent, serialized crime - but the bureaucracy of academia has been standing in the way. It’s as though the university has never heard of a timely process, like it assumes his funding goes on forever rather than the standard two years.

And finally, the pretty barista who works at his favourite coffee shop and sometimes flirts with him is kind of mad at him.

The last one, he tells himself, isn’t a _real_ problem, because he and Betty were never anything to begin with, but it still sucks. She’d quickly become the brightest, best part of his day, and after weeks of her seeming to slightly lower whatever inhibitions and walls were keeping her from an easy conversation with him, he’d made one mistake and things had reverted back to end-of-September territory almost instantly.

All he’d wanted to do was spend a little more time with her, and instead of being a real person and asking her to go on a date or out for a drink, Jughead had offered to help her decorate her place of employment. It had gone well, he’d thought, until she’d noticed that he clearly had no plans on Thanksgiving and had very kindly and generously extended an invite to share her Christmas holiday with him.

He’d wanted to say yes - he’s been dying for any excuse to see her outside of Shots! (Of Espresso) - but Christmas is so far the only holiday that he’s actually got any kind of plans for. He and Jellybean are reuniting in Riverdale for their annual movies-and-Chinese tradition, and since he hasn’t seen his little sister since she’d left for New York, he’s been really looking forward to it.

Unfortunately, in mentioning it to Betty, Jughead clearly must have neglected to properly express how excited he was for the prospect of literally any further interaction with her at all, holiday or not, because she’d seemed to crumble at his explanation. He’d left almost immediately afterward in awkwardness, and when he’d returned the next day for a cup of coffee, she’d handed him his usual red eye with the exact same friendly dismissal that he’s seen her use on every other regular customer.

Because that’s what he is, Jughead realizes. A regular customer. Not special, not a potential friend or anything more. Just regular.

His misery extends almost to the second week of December, when it (sort of) ends. After weeks of badgering him, Jughead’s supervisor finally makes a phone call to the ethics committee, which afterward seems to magically produce an approval for his project. He fine-tunes his questions, reviews them with his supervisor, and manages to book his first interview: Perry Jude, a serial rapist and three-time murderer who’d been locked up at the state penitentiary in Cañon City since the late 1980s.

Jughead wants to share his happiness, but when he goes into Shots! (Of Espresso) after school as usual, he’s reminded of two things: regular people don’t like to hear about serial killers, and Betty the barista doesn’t care anyway.

Still, he’s got a lot of work to do, and his apartment is as unusable as ever. Besides, he’s going to lose a couple of weeks of productivity around the holidays, and with the Jude interview scheduled for the beginning of January, he’s got some ground to cover in terms of appropriate preparation. So he walks up to the counter where Betty is working, nods a hello to the owner, who’s hovering behind Betty, and puts in an order for an americano with an extra shot of espresso.

“Sure, that’ll be five seventy-six,” Betty tells him, pulling a clean mug from the tray beside her. “Do you need room for cream?”

 _You know I don’t,_ Jughead wants to reply.

Instead, he shakes his head. “No thank you.” He drops a five and a one on the counter and then steps to the side, even though there is no queue behind him.

As he waits for his drink, Jughead watches Betty carefully. She’s got her attention on the espresso machine, her hands expertly working, and the tip of her tongue is _just_ poking out from the corner of her lips. She’s still very pretty, but her eyes look a bit more tired than usual, and he wonders briefly if he’s the only one who’s lost sleep over whatever seems to have happened - or not happened - a couple of weeks prior.

When she sets the mug down on the counter, Jughead takes extra care to lean a little further toward her than necessary, so that he can speak to her without her boss entering the conversation. “Hey, Betty?”

She stops and looks at him with pure, wide-eyed innocence and confusion, as though she can’t possibly think of why this person would need to further engage with her. “Yes?”

Jughead bites the inside of his lip. “The, uh - the decorations look really nice. You did a good job.”

“Oh.” Betty blinks. “Thank you.”

He stands there and looks at her for a moment, hoping that she’ll say something else, but she doesn’t. “Okay, well, thanks again for this,” he manages to stammer out, then takes his mug and his bag over to his favourite corner table.

 

 

There are two weeks remaining until Jughead has to leave to Riverdale for Christmas, and he spends it buried under a mountain of work.

First, there is his actual paying work. In October, when he was more ambitious, he’d (probably foolishly) taken on an extra job that was scheduled for launch before the holidays. Now that the deadline looms near, it’s becoming clearer to Jughead just how many bugs there are in his scripts, and subsequently just how much time it will take to identify and fix them all.

Then, of course, there is the prep for his early-January interview with Perry Jude, which is coming fast and furious. Part of his preparation includes regular meetings with his supervisor, who's renowned in his own right for research in the area of serialized violence.

“They’re not like other people you’ve met, Jughead,” he keeps warning. “They’re … missing something.”

Jughead isn’t concerned. He knows that it’ll be - to phrase it nicely - _odd_ to meet someone who’s committed murders, but it won’t be his first time. Riverdale is not an innocent town, and he is not an innocent man. He _knows_ what lurks in the darkness. He knows what drives people there, too: desperation. He’s ready, mentally, to meet someone who has approached that darkness with terrible, rigid organization.

At the end of the two weeks, which have proven themselves to be probably the busiest fortnight of his life, Jughead feels accomplished. He has a little more reading to do, but he thinks he’s mostly ready for the Jude interview, and he’s finished his design job. There is just one more task to complete before he takes a flight to New York.

The bookstore on campus doesn’t have what he needs, so Jughead takes an extra bus further downtown to reach a Barnes and Noble. He scrawls a note on half of a piece of looseleaf and slips it inside, then drops the book into a small gift bag and takes another bus home to his apartment.

On the way from the bus stop, Jughead stops into Shots! (Of Espresso). It’s Betty’s day off, which probably works even better than if she’d actually been there, so he grabs a tea to go and asks the other barista, Toni, if she could pass the bag along to Betty.

Toni’s eyes sparkle with both curiosity and mischief. “A gift? What is it?”

Jughead sighs with impatience. He has two hours to wrap Jellybean’s gifts and pack them into his bag before he has to go to the airport, and those two hours do not include five minutes to argue with Toni. “Can you just give it to her, please?” he asks. Without waiting for a reply, he snatches the prepared tea from the counter, fixes his bag over his shoulder, and leaves.

 

 

Christmas goes fine. He spends much of the first part of it checking his phone a little too often, and when it becomes clear that there are no messages that are coming, he turns his attention to his sister. They spend Christmas in the cold trailer, eating too much takeout and watching bad movies, and it’s perfect.

 

 

It continues in January.

Jughead is beyond excited when he arrives back in Denver on January 2nd. He unpacks, does laundry, and reviews his notes almost obsessively. Then, the following day, he rents a car and drives two hours south to Cañon City.

It’s not his first time at a prison, but the one that his father is housed at is not a maximum security institution, and there are a lot more precautions taken in Cañon City. The extra searches and paperwork take more time than expected, so by the time Jughead reaches an interview room and sits down across from the man that he recognizes as a slightly older Perry Jude, he’s a little late.

He hopes that he doesn’t need to rush to make up the extra time, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. He leaves when they’re through with the conversation, collecting the belongings he’d surrendered at security and threading his suspenders back onto his jeans before stumbling quietly through the parking lot and practically falling into his car.

He knows darkness; it’s what he’s always said. Some people are bad and some people are good and it’s circumstances that exacerbate those behaviours. He believes that.

Or he had, at least before. Now, Jughead thinks, he needs to change the tense of those words. He’d _known_ darkness. He _believed_ in contextual triggers for behaviours. But that was before. Before he’d sat across from Perry Jude and realized that evil wasn’t just something to write about on his laptop - that it was real, and it was _in_ people, and it grabbed them and took hold and brought innocent others down, too.

This darkness, Jughead realizes, is not the same as the one he knows. And with that, he’s not quite sure that this is what he should be doing after all.

There’s a text from his best friend Archie on his cell phone when Jughead finally manages to check it. _**How did it go, man?**_

Jughead sighs and rests his head on the steering wheel for a long minute before sitting up and tapping out a quick response.

_**Great.** _

 

 

It’s likely not the ideal time to interact with other people, given how he’s feeling, but Jughead also can’t fathom the idea of going home right now and sitting in his apartment by himself. He hasn’t taken another design job yet since before Christmas, and he doesn’t really want to do school, either - he’s had enough of serial killers for today - so he does something he hasn’t in awhile.

He gets a book, shoves it in his bag, and heads to the coffee shop that’s down one flight of stairs and around the corner from his apartment.

Jughead settles down at his favourite table before he orders. He puts his bag down on the chair opposite to the one he’s seated on, pulls out his tattered copy of _Treasure Island_ , and stares at it.

“That’s not your usual.”

A voice over his left shoulder nearly makes Jughead jump out of his skin. He turns quickly to see who’s spoken and is surprised to see that it’s Betty, holding an empty mug in one hand and a steaming pot of coffee in the other.

“Sorry,” she apologizes. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s okay,” Jughead says quickly. “I’m just - yeah, had a hell of a day.”

She nods, slowly. “Sorry to hear.” She holds up the coffee pot. “Caffeine?”

Jughead smiles and quickly nods. “Yeah, please. Sorry, I was about to go up and order, just -”

“Stevenson is enthralling, I get it,” Betty cuts in, a small but warm smile on her face. “Really more of a book you read as a kid, though.”

Jughead watches Betty set the mug down on his table and fill it with coffee. “Yeah, it was my favourite,” he confirms. He pokes the spine, which is flaking. “Well read, as you can tell.”

“The best ones all look like that.” Betty presses her lips together, and it’s only after a few beats of silence that Jughead realizes that she’s nervous. “Um. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you. For the book,” she adds quickly. “It was a nice gesture.”

 _Right._ In the chaos and horror of today, Jughead had entirely forgotten about the copy of _Beloved_ that he’d given her as something of a Christmas peace offering, and of the note with his phone number and a gentle apology that he’d slipped inside. “I assume you’ve read it already, but it’s a favourite of mine,” he says by way of reply.

“I have,” Betty confirms. “I actually lost my copy a while ago, it got - I lost it. So it was nice to see the book again. A much cleaner copy than mine,” she adds with a slight laugh, “no annotations.”

“Yet, I hope.”

“Yeah.” Betty nods. “None yet. I’ll have to add some.”

“If you do, we could switch after,” Jughead offers. “Would be interesting to see if you’re drawn to the same passages as I was.”

“The lazy man’s book club,” she pronounces, smiling wider now. “Yeah, that’d be nice. I will.” She shifts onto the other leg, glances at the counter, and sighs. “I should go help Toni soon. Um. I hope your day improves.”

Jughead smiles. “It already has,” he assures her. He holds up _Treasure Island_. “Not even serial killers are a match for buried treasure and pirates.”

Betty frowns. “Serial killers?” she asks, looking both completely surprised and not at all. He knows that she’s seen some of his books and articles strewn across the tables here, and guesses that she’s trying not to make that obvious.

He takes a little pity on her. “Yeah, I - it’s not really great small talk, but - I told you before that I’m doing a Masters in Forensic Psychology at UDenver, right?”

She nods.

“Well, my focus is on serialized violence, and today I had my first interview with an offender.”

The word _offender_ seems to hit her like a backhand, and Jughead worries that he’s already said too much.

“That’s … wow,” Betty says. She’s blinking quickly. “Why - um - why … that?”

It’s a legitimate question, and while Jughead isn’t the type to divulge his entire life to someone he doesn’t know, there’s something about Betty that makes him feel at ease. So he answers her. “The town I grew up in, the area - it was pretty rough, and things weren’t great at home. My parents … well, they’re both a piece of work, you could say, and I guess I’ve always sort of been curious about people with a darkness hanging over then, you know? What makes them tick, how do they make the choices they make, that sort of thing. And all of that led me here.”

She doesn’t say anything, but looks at him with intense eyes. Jughead takes a long sip of his coffee, then sets the mug down again. It’s not an awkward silence.

“Anyway, the interview today … the guy I spoke to, he was just … I don’t know. It was something a lot darker than what I’d expected. And now I just kind of feel a little foolish, because I’m starting to think it’s not something that we’re meant to understand.”

Betty looks over at the growing line and bites her lower lip again. “That sounds really heavy,” she says, her words coming out carefully, like she’s chosen them individually and they’re coming out in pieces. “But I think you’re right.”

“How so?”

“They’re no match for buried treasure and pirates.”

Jughead exhales his breath into laughter. His chest feels less constricted. “Yeah. Definitely.”

Betty returns his smile, then nods to the counter. “I’ve got to go help, but - let me know when you need a refill.”

“Oh!” Jughead suddenly realizes he hasn’t paid her and digs in his pocket for a few dollar bills, but Betty waves him off once it’s clear what he’s looking for.

“On the house.”

Jughead’s throat begins to swell with the unfamiliar emotion of gratitude. “Thanks,” he says genuinely. Then, before he can second guess himself, he blurts, “Do you want to go hiking sometime?”

Betty blinks at him, surprised. “Hiking?” she repeats.

“Uh, yeah.” He shifts awkwardly on the chair. “I usually ride my bike to blow off steam, but I had to put it away for the winter. A friend of mine suggested hiking.”

“It’s a little snowy for hiking,” Betty says, barely suppressing a smile. “But we could go snowshoeing.”

Jughead’s only heard of snowshoes in the fictional sense, as a young boy reading YA novels about kids lost in the woods with wolves, but he’s so happy that she’s agreed that he just nods fervently. He’ll Google it later. “Yeah, that sounds great. Um. This weekend?”

Betty nods, already backing away as Toni calls her name for help. “Sure. I’ll text you,” she promises, eyes twinkling beside her flushed cheeks. “After all, I’ve got your number.”

 

* * *

 

_There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind - wrapped tight like skin._

Betty sighs, trailing her fingers briefly over the words she’s underlined in _Beloved_ before letting the book fall shut atop her fingers. She tips her head back, resting it against the wall, and wonders what Jughead would think about those lines speaking to her.

It’s late, and she has an early wake-up call - Jughead is meeting her at Shots! with a rental car at eight in the morning (she’d initially suggested seven, but amended that quickly at the flash of horror on his face) - but she can’t manage to get to sleep. She lives in a loft-style apartment, which means that from where she’s sitting beneath the blankets on her bed, she can see the snowshoes propped by the door. They belonged to her parents; she’d retrieved them from her storage unit a couple days prior.

Those snowshoes call to mind memories that don’t seem like they should belong to her, flames crackling pleasantly in the fireplace, a flannel nightie skimming her shins, rubbing sleepy eyes as she took a seat at the kitchen table. Her parents, dressed in outdoor gear, her mother in pink and her father in blue, looking every bit like Barbie and Ken to her young eyes. Her mother’s voice: _Polly’s in charge today._ The stubble on her father’s chin brushing her skin as he leaned down to kiss her forehead. The sound of the door closing, the car starting, and her sister’s devilish grin as she pushed aside bowls of oatmeal and unveiled an illicit box of Lucky Charms.

There’s happiness there, in her memories, but Betty can only see the shadows in the background now.

She sets her book aside, turns her lamp off, and shut her eyes, determined to sleep. Maybe by tomorrow night she’ll have different memories to go with those snowshoes.

 

 

When he pulls up to the curb in his rented car, Jughead is sporting the slightly stunned look of a night owl forced to wake with the dawn on a Sunday. Betty is armed with caffeine, and she hands him a large to-go cup when he gets out to open the trunk for her.

“Thank you,” he says, bringing it to his mouth immediately. There’s a little bit of grit in his voice; she wonders if his voice has a growl to it first thing in the morning.

“Of course,” she says easily, stowing the snowshoes and her backpack in the trunk. “I’m, um - ” She fishes her phone out of her pocket. “I’m going to take a picture of the license plate and send it to Toni.” She cringes preemptively, expecting that he might be affronted. “It’s not you, it’s - ”

“I wouldn’t be offended if it was me,” he says, placing a light hand on her shoulder. “Most people would have some hesitance about going into the mountains with a man who studies serial killers.”

“It’s not you, really,” she insists. “I just… I think it’s important to be careful.”

“It is,” he agrees, and waves a hand toward the back of the car as if to say _go ahead_.

She snaps the picture and texts it to Toni, then makes her way toward the passenger side of the car. As he climbs into the driver’s seat, Jughead says, “Thanks for bringing everything; sorry I’m kind of useless. I’ve never been particularly outdoorsy.”

“No problem,” she says, entering Hessie Trailhead into the car’s GPS.

Jughead pulls away from Shots! and makes his way out of the city. He turns on the radio to Indie 101.5 but keeps the volume fairly low. “D’you know what else you might want to text Toni?” Without waiting for a reply, he says, “My last name. I just realized we don’t know each other’s.” He glances at her quickly and Betty quirks as eyebrow, a gesture that asks _and yours is?_

“Jones,” he tells her.

“Jughead Jones,” she says, testing it out. “That’s cheating, you know. Your last name’s not the real secret. What’s your first name, really?”

He groans. “You really want to know?”

“I _really_ do,” she says, shifting in her seat so that her body is angled toward his. She thinks she might even bat her lashes a little.

Jughead sighs. “Okay.” He seems to have to steel himself for his confession. “It’s Forsythe.”

“Forsythe?” she repeats. She doesn’t know what she was expecting, but that wasn’t it.

“Yup,” he says. “It’s a family name. Means _man of peace_.”

“That’s nice,” Betty says, sincerely. If there’s anything she could use more of, peace is it.

“Yeah, I guess. None of my predecessors have really lived up to it, though, Miss… ?”

“Smith,” she says, knotting her fingers together in her lap. “I’ve never looked up its meaning, but I’m going to guess it has something to do with blacksmithing.”

“Sounds about right.” He throws her a smile. “Betty Smith.”

“Elizabeth. Technically.”

“What’s that mean? Elizabeth.”

“My mom says it means _pledged to God._ ”

Jughead nods thoughtfully. “And do you feel pledged to God?”

“No,” she says, simply and truthfully. “Not at all.”

He reaches over and taps his index finger twice against her kneecap before withdrawing his hand again, giving her back her personal space. She looks into his face and he tells her, in a stage whisper, “Neither do I.”

There is a laugh in Betty’s mouth, then, and it spills right out.

 

 

They snowshoe along the Lost Lake Trail, which is Betty’s favourite, even though it’s one of her easier hiking paths. Jughead is a little awkward in his snowshoes at first, but she shows him how to kick-step through the powder and he gets the hang of it quickly enough, and they follow the slow incline to the sounds of their own breathing and snow crunching underfoot.

Using one of her poles, Betty points out an old mine to him as they go. “When I was little, I was convinced that was some kind of portal. Like the wardrobe to Narnia.”

“Yeah?” Jughead asks on a huff of air.

“Yeah.” She comes to a stop, digging her poles into the snow, suspecting that he could use a break but that he’s not going to ask for one.

“Did you grow up in Denver?”

There’s a beat of silence and then she says, “Yeah. Basically.”

“So little Betty Smith used to walk these very trails?”

There’s a tugging feeling in her chest that Betty determinedly ignores. “Yep.”

“She was probably a better hiker than I am, right?”

Betty takes a deep breath, a cleansing one, and re-centers herself in the moment. “Little Betty was very polite. She’d say you’re doing a great job.”

Jughead breathes a laugh, leaning on his poles. “So I guess that means adult Betty is regretting her decision to take the guy from New York snowshoeing, huh?”

“No,” she says with a soft laugh of her own. “No, this is nice. I hike a lot, but… doing it with company, it’s sort of like seeing everything through fresh eyes.”

“It’s beautiful,” Jughead acknowledges, looking around at the snow-coated branches of the trees, at the day’s bright blue sky, at the nearby mountains reaching toward the clouds.

“I love it in the winter,” Betty says. “But it’s nice in the summer, too. A different kind of beautiful. You should come back then. In the spring, before too many tourists show up.” She breathes in again, slowly, lungs filling to capacity. “I - I could come with you,” she offers tentatively. “Show you my favourite views.”

Jughead grins, his eyes wrinkling at their corners. “If I make it through today,” he says, “you’ve got yourself a deal.”

 

 

When they get back to the city, Betty decides to ask Jughead to drop her off at her apartment instead of at Shots!. She can trust him enough, she thinks, to let him know where she lives.

That trust turns out to be an asset. As they unload the snowshoeing gear from the trunk, Betty reaches into the small pocket in her backpack in which she always keeps her keys - and finds it empty. Frowning, she rifles through the rest of her bag, wondering if she may have accidentally stashed them somewhere else.

“You okay?” Jughead asks.

“Yeah, I just can’t find my - ” And it comes to her in a flash, a perfectly clear image: her keys, sitting in the little tray where she always keeps them on her kitchen counter, left behind this morning as she juggled two pairs of snowshoes out the door. “I forgot my keys. Shit.”

“Do you have a roommate who would’ve locked up?”

Betty shakes her head. “No, my door locks automatically - like a hotel door, you know?” She sighs. “God, I’m going to have to call the company that installed it…”

Jughead is looking at her building - it’s technically a house, converted ages ago into apartments; Betty lives on the top floor - critically, some sort of calculations going on behind his eyes. “Which one’s you?”

Miserably, she points up.

He leans to the right, examining the side of the house for a long moment before nodding to himself. He sets the snowshoes he’s holding back into the trunk and closes it. “I can get you in.”

“What?”

He takes her elbow, guiding her forward. “This way.”

At the base of the fire escape, he bends down and cups his hands together. “We’re going up. Let me give you a boost.”

Betty stares at him before turning her gaze to the rusted fire escape. “Through the window? I have an alarm.”

“You can disable it once you’re in, right?”

“Yes,” she says slowly.

“There we go. You can get in right now; no waiting hours for some company representative to show up and charge you a ridiculous amount for replacing your lock.” The look he gives her is teasing, encouraging. “I need my favourite barista well-rested. I have a nine a.m. seminar tomorrow.”

She eyes the fire escape again. “I’m too heavy for you to lift,” she protests.

“You are not.” Jughead stays where he is, his hands still waiting for her foot. “Betty, hey. Trust me.”

She worries her bottom lip with her teeth. Trusting him is, after all, what she’s trying to do.

It takes her a moment to summon the courage, but she does it, and she plants her boot against his waiting palms.

 

 

Jughead gets her window open with a combination of his keys, his student ID, a bobby pin from her hair, and a bit of old-fashioned manpower. As her alarm starts blaring, he pops the screen out and gestures for her to go inside. Betty crawls through, self-conscious of the view of her ass that doing so gives him. Inside, she hurries toward the door and punches the alarm code into the keypad.

“I’ll go get the gear from the car,” Jughead calls from the window. “Will you let me in the door?”

“Yeah, sure - ” Betty takes a few steps back toward him. “How did you know how to do that?”

“Long story,” he says, with a smile that looks sad, and then he disappears back down the fire escape.

After he’s brought up everything from the trunk, Jughead volunteers to help her get the screen back into her window. Betty’s pretty confident that she can manage that task on her own, but she finds herself accepting his offer. He takes off his boots, and she watches as his sock feet land on her hardwood floor. He’s the first man - besides the one who installed the lock on her door and the plumber who came in once to fix the sink - to step foot in her apartment.

“Nice place,” he tells her, glancing around, interested but not nosy.

“Thanks,” Betty says. Her apartment is pretty sparse, especially in comparison with the lavishly decorated penthouse that Cheryl and Toni share, but it works for her. Her decor is minimal: fake flowers here, a piece of abstract art there. All the walls are ivory, which is a pretty sharp contrast to the floral wallpaper that lined the walls of her childhood bedroom.

“Smells good, too,” Jughead says. He gets the window back in order fairly quickly, and Betty notices that he even locks it. “Like… cookies?”

“Vanilla,” she says with a little smile, nodding to the candle on her countertop.

“Ah.” Jughead slips his hands into his pockets. “Well, your window’s all good again.”

“Thank you. And thank you for getting me in.”

“No problem.”

“Do you - ” Betty hesitates. “Do you want a cup of coffee? To warm up?”

Jughead smiles. “You know I can’t say no to caffeine.”

She busies herself with her French press as Jughead wanders slowly through her apartment toward the two stools set up by her kitchen counter. In her peripheral vision, she can see him studying her bookshelf - it’s quite small, and it houses nearly as many old journals as it does novels. She wonders if this disappoints him.

“Thank you again for the book,” she says as she waits for the coffee to steep. “I’ve been reading it. It’s so sad.”

Jughead’s face scrunches slightly. “Maybe not the best gift then, huh,” he says sheepishly.

“No,” she says quickly. “No, I love it. It’s sad, but it’s also so beautiful. Morrison used to be my favourite author, actually. She was my hero.”

“Used to be?”

“Well - ” Betty presses her lips together. “Still is, I guess. I just haven’t really… thought about that kind of thing in a long time. Literary heroes and stuff.”

He looks at her like he’s willing to listen if she wants to say more, but she doesn’t. When the silence begins to stretch, he asks, “Which one of hers is your favourite?”

She hardly even has to think about it. “ _A Mercy._ You?”

“Mine’s _Love._ ”

“I - ” Betty turns back to the French Press and slowly pushes the plunger down. “I haven’t read that one, actually.”

“I could lend it to you, if you want. I think I brought it with me.”

She looks over her shoulder at him, now perched on one of the stools by the counter, not looking anywhere near as jarringly out of place in her apartment as she’d expected him to. Her mouth is suddenly dry, her tongue sticking to its roof.

“I’d like that,” she says, and takes two mugs out of the cupboard.

 

 

tbc.


	4. Chapter 4

_My bridge is burned,_  
_Perhaps we'll shortly learn_  
_that it was arson all along._

 

All in all, Jughead’s getting used to Denver. He’s adjusting to the slightly thinner air. His skin is suddenly dry all the time, so he’s begun buying moisturizer and actually using it. Given both of his parents’ histories with drugs, he’s never particularly been interested in marijuana, but he might start getting into craft beer just because - well, he’s in Denver, and breweries seem to comprise at least ten per cent of buildings here. He’s even been _snowshoeing,_ which sure, had a little more to do with the person who’d accompanied him and less to do with actual nature, but he’s still counting it as part of his embrace of Colorado.

There is, however, one thing that he’s not completely adjusted to: the weather. He grew up in Riverdale, which is truly as unpredictable a town as has ever existed, but at least winter generally actually means winter in New York. In Denver, Jughead has found himself making plans around an assumed season, only for the actual temperature to be something wildly different. The chinooks are something altogether new to him, and while the warm winds are welcome, it’s a bit strange to wear a heavy parka one Friday and be too hot in his unlined denim jacket the following Monday. Similarly, he’d begun to think on a Wednesday that he should pull his bike out of storage early, only for a heavy snowfall to hit the next day.

But there’s not much of a workaround for any of it, so Jughead does the one thing that he _can_ do: complain. He walks into his local coffee shop after a meeting with his supervisor, drops his bag onto the chair of his regular table, and lines up to get a red eye. There’s no blonde ponytail behind the counter when he first arrives, but he knows that Betty is working, and by the time that he reaches the front of the line, it’s her at the till.

“Hi,” she greets, pulling a mug down from the stack. Her eyes aren’t avoiding his, exactly, but her glances are both repeated and fleeting. It’s par for the course with her; she’s some very specific kind of shy, he’s come to realize. She isn’t timid, per se. Rather, she seems to be wary and careful, and even though they’re starting to become friends, it still takes a few beats for her guard to ease up.

Jughead brushes snow off the sleeve of his jacket, which had been warm enough yesterday but decidedly _wasn’t_ today. “Mountain weather is weird,” he grumbles.

That puts a smile on Betty’s face almost immediately. “Oh?” she questions, clearly a little amused. “Snow catch you off guard?”

Behind Betty, her coworker Toni pipes up. “You gotta wear layers, beanie boy!” She’s cleaning one of the coffeemakers after an apparent spill, a task which evidently does not require so much focus that it precludes eavesdropping.

He nods at both of them. “I’ll get the hang of it eventually,” he replies, but it’s more of a guess to himself than anything. “I’m trying to lean into it all.”

“Very Sheryl Sandberg of you,” Betty quips. She slides a full mug across the counter. “Five seventy-three.”

“Oh, I’ll - can I get a cookie too, actually?” he asks, feeling strangely awkward about interrupting the transaction.

“Of course, sorry.” Betty clicks something on her till and picks up a pair of plastic tongs as she approaches the baking case. “What kind? We’ve got chocolate chip, macadamia nut, oatmeal, oatmeal raisin, black-and-white-”

“Don’t get raisins,” Toni advises as she passes by the counter. She’s holding a coffee-soaked cloth at arm’s length, like the drips will infect her somehow, and disappears into the back.

Betty shakes her head after her. “The raisins are good,” she tells Jughead.

He smiles and shrugs. “Dealer’s choice.”

“Hmm.” She bites her lip and pretends to think hard about the decision. The sight of the very tip of her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration makes Jughead’s chest feel suddenly and oddly warm. She selects a double-chocolate chunk cookie and presents it to him on a plate faux-victoriously. “This is the winner,” she informs him, punching in the extra order. “They just came out of the oven an hour ago, so they should be -” She glances up, seems to notice him apparently still just standing there, smiling at her, and cocks an eyebrow. “What? What’s going on?”

“Nothing, that was just - you’re cute.” Jughead can feel his face grow hot at his own honesty, has immediate regret, and quickly slides a ten dollar bill across the counter.

 _How embarrassing, Jughead,_ a voice that sounds suspiciously like Jellybean’s is already saying. _No grown woman wants to be called ‘cute’._

He takes his coffee and picks the cookie up from the porcelain dish. “It uh, won’t last long enough to need the plate,” he explains, hoping that either she’d gone temporarily deaf or the earth had swallowed him whole. “Thanks.” He then dashes away to his table as quickly as seems normal.

Mercifully, a line has formed behind him, so Betty is busy as soon as he departs to die in the corner. As he sits down and starts sorting out his research notes to prepare for his next offender interview, Jughead can hear her calling for Toni’s assistance. He decides to immerse himself in his papers while Betty presumably does the same with the new customers, and it seems to work. The memory of his dumb, dumb comment ceases to occupy the central part of his mind, and images of bodies buried in the woods and long jury trials take its place.

Jughead isn’t sure which is worse.

 

 

By the following Thursday, Jughead believes that his awkwardness must have faded a sufficient amount to be able to show his face at Shots! again. It’s now been about a week and a half since Betty had taken him snowshoeing, and four days since told her she was _cute_ mid-flirtation - although he still wants to die just thinking about it and what he assumes was her horror-stricken reaction, which he’d been too embarrassed to check.

He hasn’t really been avoiding the café, exactly; he’d had another interview with an offender, this time on the phone, and between the preparation for that, the actual time itself, and a day that Betty hadn’t been working, it’s just sort of turned out that they hadn’t run into each other. Which had suited him fine, really, since she tends to distract him a little and he _had_ needed to get a lot done - and if it allowed for time for his stupidity to fall from the history books, well, that appears to have been just a bonus.

But the fact is that Jughead lives around the corner and up a flight of stairs from the café, so there’s no way that he’s going to be bypassing its caffeinated products - and its pretty baristas - forever.

Jughead doesn’t have class on Thursday, and he has a fair bit of new web design work to make a dent in, so he decides to take his laptop down to the coffee shop earlier than usual. He’s been coming here long enough to know that Toni works the morning shift, with Betty not starting until around eleven, so he’s already sitting at his table with a coffee and a bagel when he sees Betty through the window around ten forty-five.

She’s wearing a camel-coloured wool coat and a white knit hat that’s definitely jauntier than his own aging grey beanie. Her chin is tucked into an enormous white scarf that matches her gloves. There’s a backpack hung over one shoulder, and her blonde hair is down for a change, falling in waves over the scarf. He thinks it’s the kind of bright outside that means he can see her and she can’t see him through the window, but when she walks beside the table with only a pane of glass separating them, she seems to catch his eye.

There’s a look of surprise, and then she smiles.

Jughead exhales in relief.

Betty walks over to his table once she’s inside the cafe, tugging her mittens and hat and scarf off as she walks. He spots a hair elastic wound around her wrist and counts himself lucky that he’s gotten to see her hair before it escapes to its usual ponytail again.

“You’re earlier than usual,” she comments.

Jughead nods and gestures to his laptop. “I woke up a little early, realized just how much work I have to do, and decided to get a head start.” Betty nods at him in understanding, and like some kind of verbal diarrhea, he blurts, “I wasn’t avoiding you.”

She frowns. “I didn’t … think you were?” she replies slowly. “Why would you be?”

 _Shit._ “Monday,” he explains, now feeling even more foolish. “I thought I might’ve been … I dunno, that you might not have appreciated my commentary.”

“Oh.” Betty’s cheeks, which had been returning to their normal pale colour after being outside, suddenly flush red again. “No, I didn’t mind that.” She tugs her phone out of her pocket and glances at the time on the front of it. “I should get ready for my shift, but if you’re sticking around, I’ll come by with a refill for that,” she offers, pointing at his mug.

Jughead grins. “Yeah. I’ll be around.”

 

 

The next day, there is a little less snow, so Jughead decides it’s a good day to head to campus and try to catch his supervisor for a quick post-interview chat. He’s unavailable, but Jughead ends up at the library anyway looking up books, figuring that he came all this way so he should try to get _something_ done.

He finds an interesting collection of early behavioural psychology articles from the mid-1980s, filled with observations from first-hand accounts of officers involved with the investigations into California’s 1970s rash of serial killers. It’s not the type of thing that he needs for his thesis, but it might give him some insight into his own approach to further offender interviews, so he checks it out onto his account.

But then he sits down to try to read it, finds himself woefully devoid of coffee, his favourite table, and a pair of pretty green eyes, and ends up back on the bus to Shots! (Of Espresso). On the way, he finds himself leaning against the worn fabric seat and thinking of Betty’s voice saying, “I didn’t mind that”. He likes her a lot, and despite the fact that they don’t know each other well, he wants to spend more time with her. It does seem, however, that she’s not going to be making the next move, so although Jughead had been the one to suggest snowshoeing, he feels like the ball is still in his court.

So he takes out his phone, Googles “things to do in Denver”, and formulates a plan.

When he arrives at the coffee shop, he notices with gratitude that it is mostly empty, meaning that Toni is in the back prepping for the next day’s baking and Betty is by herself behind the counter. She’s wearing the same branded apron that all of the employees do, but today the shirt beneath it has a wide cut with a slight slant to the V, and Jughead finds his eyes drawn to the smooth skin covering the rise of her clavicle. He’s very briefly and quickly overcome with the urge to attach his mouth to it, before snapping his eyes up to meet hers.

“Hi,” Betty greets. “What’ll it be today?”

“Hey.” He glances at the menu, having not thought about this part ahead of time, and figures _fuck it_ “Just a regular drip coffee, please,” he requests. “Medium roast. And …”

“And?” Betty prompts, once he’s been silent for a longer than a few seconds.

“And I wanted to know if you’re free tomorrow,” he finishes, tapping his toe anxiously inside his boot. “I’m planning on going to the Air and Space Museum, and if you’d be interested, I’d love the company.”

“Oh!” Betty looks surprised, as though this was not a potential event that had ever crossed her mind before.

“Only if you’d be interested,” Jughead reiterates, wanting to give her an easy out. “Planes and space stuff aren’t everyone’s thing, so I get it. Or if you’ve been...”

“I haven’t,” she interrupts, reaching halfway across the counter before stopping and withdrawing her hand, as though she’d meant to touch his and had thought better of it. “I haven’t been.”

Jughead nods, unsure of what that was supposed to indicate. “Cool. So you’d be in?”

“Um.” Betty swallows and then inhales audibly before answering. “Yeah, that sounds fun.”

His face breaks into a grin. “Great.”

“Yeah.” She stands across from him, smiling. “It’s kind of out of the way. We can meet here and share a Lyft? Or do you still have the rental car?”

Jughead shakes his head apologetically. “I don’t, so Lyft it is.”

“Awesome.” Betty tugs the corner of her lip between her teeth and looks at him for a moment before her jaw drops and she lets out a little gasp. “Oh my god, your coffee! I’m sorry. I was just about to brew a fresh pot of the medium roast, so I’ll bring it out to you.” She waves away his crumpled dollar bills. “On the house.”

Jughead gives her a little nod in thanks. “Looks like it’s my lucky day, on both accounts,” he says, and he swears that her cheeks flush a bit.

 

 

The following day, Jughead heads down to the coffee shop to meet Betty around eleven. She’s not working, but when he walks in the doors, he can see her in the back office area, talking to Toni and a redheaded girl that he’s seen flitting through the café every now and then. He’s gathered that the girl is dating Toni, judging by how heavily they seem to flirt, and that the girl is either Someone Important or someone who thinks that they are.

He isn’t sure if he’s supposed to wait outside - last time, when they’d gone snowshoeing, she’d been standing just beyond the doors on the sidewalk - so rather than approach the counter, he waits to the side so that he’s just along Betty’s line of sight.

It takes almost a minute, but at one point she glances out, notices him standing there, and then immediately appears to make her goodbyes. The redheaded girl peeks out to look at him as Betty hurries toward him; she has a harsh shade of red painted on her lips that matches that of her skirt _and_ her nails, and Jughead instantly pegs her as either a mean girl or somebody who used to be.

Jughead barely has time to nod at Betty before he’s pushed through the doors; his “hello” is caught halfway on his tongue as she ushers them onto the sidewalk and down the block.

“Sorry,” Betty apologizes, “we should’ve maybe met elsewhere, I didn’t realize she’d be there.”

Jughead blinks in confusion, but lets Betty tug him by his sleeve halfway to the hardware store on the corner of the next avenue. “She who?”

“Cheryl. She’s Toni’s girlfriend.” Betty stops and looks sheepish as she pulls the Lyft app up on her phone. “You don’t know it, but I just saved you from her.”

“What’s wrong with her?” her asks, bewildered.

“Nothing’s _wrong_ with her,” she answers, her words chosen carefully, “but she’s a bit pushy sometimes, and - anyway, I guess she heard from Toni that you and I were going to the museum today, and she sort of swooped in to catch a sight of you.”

Jughead laughs. “A _sight of me_ ,” he prods teasingly, adding, “I’ve always known I was that interesting.”

Betty rolls her eyes at him. “Toni was in the back yesterday when you came in, so she heard us make plans.”

He chuckles. “Yeah, I figured. Well, for what it’s worth, I don’t think Cheryl would intimidate me. I’ve met a few of those girls in my lifetime, I think.”

The Lyft pulls up; Betty double checks with with the driver before opening the backseat door for Jughead. “Impossible,” she disagrees, “there’s no one quite like Cheryl.”

 

 

The trip to the Air and Space Museum is fine, but once they’re inside, it’s even better. The museum itself is not as busy as he’d thought it would be for a Saturday, so he doesn’t feel rushed while walking down the aisles of old planes and exhibits. Betty seems to be enjoying the museum, which he’s glad for; he can’t believe she’s never been despite growing up in the area, and for a moment upon arrival he’d had a disappointing thought that she hadn’t yet been because she didn’t care to go.

Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be the case. As it turns out, Betty knows quite a bit about engines, and some of the more technical exhibits appear to interest her. Jughead feels a little bit like a kid playing with paper airplanes again, but when he sees the exhibit that’s replicated part of the International Space Station, that feeling doubles.

“I always wanted to be an astronaut,” he comments to Betty as they approach the sign that reads _Science in Space for Life on Earth_. “When I was younger, I mean. Little.”

She looks up at him and smiles. “I guess all little kids want to be astronauts. Or firefighters.”

“Easily identifiable jobs,” Jughead agrees. “Then I found out you needed to be good at math, and that stopped that.”

Betty laughs. “I shouldn’t be surprised. I already know you’re a literature nerd.”

He bumps her shoulder. “Takes one to know one,” he jokes. “But you’re right. The math thing is much more my sister’s speed.”

“Your sister?” Betty asks, the bit of knowledge seemingly piquing her interest. “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

 _There’s no reason you would know,_ Jughead wants to reply, but it feels unnecessarily harsh. Getting to know each other is, after all, why they’re even hanging out. Instead, he nods. “She’s six years younger than me. Just got her done with high school last year, and now she’s at college in New York, actually.”

“Good for her.” Betty touches the sheen of the exhibit wall. It’s detailing all of the research that goes on at the International Space Station, and how the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space is hoping to change the world. “Maybe she’ll work for NASA.”

Jughead’s eyes follow Betty’s fingertips. “She’s undeclared so far,” he finally says. “That would be cool, but I just want her to be happy, more than anything. Our parents weren’t - aren’t - the best all the time, and she deserves it.”

He’s hesitant to look at Betty’s face after that comment, assuming that he’ll see the usual pity there that always seems to appear in these kinds of situations, but he’s surprised - pleasantly - to see none of that in her expression. Instead, her eyes crinkle kindly at the corners. “You seem like a great brother.”

“I try,” Jughead says honestly.

He’d already told her a little about his parents, when she’d questioned the impetus for his academic program, but talking about them in the context of Jellybean feels much, much heavier. All of their faults, all of the ways that they’d let him down - he can handle that. He’s _over_ that, maybe. But Jellybean is a different story altogether. He will never forgive them for almost letting her slip through the cracks, too.

He isn’t sure if it’s serendipity or sensitivity, but just as Jughead is scrambling for a subject change, Betty taps him on the shoulder and says, in a voice more excited than he’s ever heard her use, “Look, a _moon_ rock!”

 

 

They finish at the museum more quickly than Jughead would have liked. Betty is, frankly, nice to be around: she’s smart and witty and has interesting things to say, and he’s not ready for the day to be over.

They step outside the museum and onto the sidewalk overlooking the parking lot. “Well, should we get a Lyft back?” Betty suggests, shoving her hands into her pockets.

“We could,” Jughead agrees. “Or … we could do something else.”

“Something else?” she echoes. “What did you have in mind?”

He shrugs. “I have nothing in mind,” he tells her honestly. “I just don’t really want to say goodbye to you yet.”

Betty’s cheeks flush. She looks down at her shoes briefly and then back up to him, and nods. “Okay,” she smiles. “Let’s do something else.”

 _Something else_ ends up being a drink and early dinner at a bar called Williams & Graham that is hidden behind a fake bookstore, which he’d chosen based on a cursory Google search of interesting Denver food destinations. Keeping in the tradition of the day, Betty’s never been, though she does advise him that there are more hidden speakeasies in the city. He’s kind of charmed by the old-school vibe of it all, and he vows to try them all.

They’re seated at a table in the corner, order drinks, and take their time perusing the menu. Jughead looks up from his to see Betty peering intently at hers. One wavy lock of hair has fallen from behind her ear, and he fights the urge to tuck it back.

She catches him staring. This time, she smiles. “What?”

“Nothing,” Jughead says quickly. He presses the toe of his boot against hers under the table. “You’re just …”

“Cute?” Betty guesses, drawing the corner of her lips in playfully.

He laughs. “Definitely that,” he agrees. “I was just - noticing, yeah. You look beautiful.”

“Oh, well.” She stares at the menu again, the tips of her ears reddening. “Good lighting in here.”

The lighting is, as a matter of fact, atrocious; it’s so dark he almost can’t see the menu. “It’s not that,” he argues, but lets the rest of the thought go. He looks around and is hopelessly drawn back to nights spent at the Whyte Wyrm in Riverdale, which was similarly poorly-lit. Williams & Graham, at least, appears to be fully reputable. “This place reminds me a little bit of a dive bar in my hometown.”

Betty glances at him. “Yeah? Old haunt?”

“My dad’s old haunt,” Jughead corrects. “Came looking for him more than once at that place.” When she winces, he waves a hand as if to say _it’s fine._ “He was - is - an alcoholic,” he explains. “If you couldn’t find him at home, you knew where he was.”

Betty’s eyes are warm and wide again. “That sounds hard,” she says softly. “On your mother and sister, and you.”

“My mom had her own set of problems.” Jughead’s big toe begins to fidget again, and he finds himself grateful that Betty can’t see his nerves. “Drugs, mostly. She’s gone now. Not sure where. They both made mistakes. Mom in particular always tried to run this line about ‘doing what needed to be done to survive’, but it’s kind of bullshit. There were other choices that they could’ve made. Especially Dad - he’s in prison.”

Betty’s expression is unreadable. He’s afraid some part of it is pity, so he looks down at his drink, which he swills around the glass.

“He went to jail the day I graduated with my bachelor’s degree. My little sister was sixteen at the time, so I moved home and stayed with her, just worked until she graduated high school and went off to college. Then I came here, and the rest is history.”

Betty’s foot comes to rest alongside his underneath the table. “So I was right earlier,” she says, with careful words as always. “You _are_ a great brother.”

His chest feels constricted, so Jughead cracks a joke to lighten the mood. “Well she’s still alive, so I’ll call that a success. Though her hair was blue, last I saw her.” He clears his throat. “What about you?”

Her eyes drop from his. “Pretty typical childhood,” she tells her menu. “Norman Rockwell would have been proud.”

 

 

Two weeks later, on the last Friday in February, Jughead’s angst over the unpredictable Colorado winters hits its peak.

He’s at school when the weather starts to turn. Snow is in the forecast, so when it starts to fall outside of the classroom windows, he’s not surprised. What he _is_ caught off guard by is the fury with which it begins to come down: fast, hard, and with big, wet flakes. He decides he doesn’t need to stick around to hit the library, and instead hops on the bus and renews his books on his phone.

The roads are still passably okay when he gets off at his stop, but he has a feeling that it’s going to get worse, which is confirmed by a renewed look at his phone’s weather app. Jughead groans; he’d wanted to see if Betty would be up for another hike this weekend, since he hasn’t seen her outside of the coffee shop in a little while, but it seems as though his plans are going to have to change.

He goes home to try to fix a script for a website he’s working on, because the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop is _just_ weak enough to sometimes cause problems, and he needs to confirm that this runs without a hitch. It takes longer than he wants it to, and by the time Jughead’s satisfied with the project and sends a mockup of the interface to his client, it’s already dark outside.

Jughead heads down to the street, searching for food. The coffee shop is great but doesn’t exactly have the kind of greasy Asian food that he’s craving, so he braves an extra block west and waits for his pad thai and spring rolls in the front foyer of a dingy hole-in-the-wall takeout place.

There’s no one around - probably because of the snow, he figures - so it doesn’t take too long. They double-bag his order and basically shove him out the door, which Jughead takes as a sign that most of the businesses are closing early. He passes on the opposite side of the street from Shots! (Of Espresso), and notices through the expansive windows that it’s equally dead inside as it is on the snowy, blustery streets.

He doesn’t really need anything from the café, but Betty’s working, and seeing her face will definitely turn his day around.

She’s wiping down tables, seemingly getting set up to close, when he trudges through the door. He makes an apologetic expression as he shifts snow across the tiled floor, and greets her with, “It is _nasty_ out there.”

Betty nods and makes her way over to him. “Do you want coffee? I’m closing early,” she explains. “Sweet Pea gave me the go-ahead. Though buses are already canceled, and the surge pricing on Uber and Lyft has started. Not that I want to get stuck on the roads with a strange Uber driver, anyway, but I’d rather not pay three hundred dollars, too.”

Jughead frowns. “How are you going to get home?”

“I’ll figure out a way,” she assures him, waving away his concern. “I still have half a pot brewed - it’s yours if you want it.”

“You know I never turn down coffee,” he accepts. “But seriously, Betty, you can’t just stay here.”

She looks around. “I’m not planning on it, but if I have to it won’t be the end of the world. Sweet Pea has a couch in his office I can pass out on.”

“No way.” Jughead shakes his head. “Why don’t you come over to my place? We can wait out the storm, and if need be, I have a couch too.”

Betty shakes her head almost immediately. “Really, it’s okay,” she says, handing him a large coffee in a to-go cup. “It’s not that bad in here.”

“It’s better up there,” Jughead argues, pointing in the general direction of his apartment. “I’ve got blankets and a fireplace and a disgusting amount of pad thai.” He holds up his takeout bag as evidence. “We can watch a bunch of book-to-film adaptations and argue over which is best.”

 _“To Kill A Mockingbird_ is the best adaptation, so that’s already settled,” Betty jokes. “I don’t want to put you out.”

Jughead tilts his head at her as if to say, _really?_ , and raises an eyebrow. _“The Age of Innocence_ begs to differ,” he argues.

“You aren’t serious. Scorsese? Give me a break-”

“Only one way to settle this,” he bargains. “Finish up here, then come around the corner. I live in the unit above the kitchen supply store. 314-B. You can’t miss it.”

Betty sighs and looks at him with a near-exasperated expression. She doesn’t say anything for a few moments, then asks, “I can’t miss it, huh?”

 

* * *

 

“Are you _sure_ this is okay?” Betty can’t help but ask the moment Jughead opens his apartment door.

“Yes, definitely. I’m not sending you out into the storm.” He reaches out, hooks two fingers into the pocket of her jacket, and uses those fingers to tug her gently inside. “C’mon.”

“Well - thank you. This is really nice of you.” She wipes her snowy boots on the mat just beyond the door.

“It’s no problem. I always order too much Thai food… and you know that I like spending time with you, right?” His gaze, as he regards her, is just a little probing. It seems like he finds it important that she knows this.

“I like spending time with you, too,” she says, soft and honest, then adds, “Or I did, anyway. Before I found out that you think _The Age of Innocence_ is some kind of great cinematic feat.”

The grin that spreads slowly across Jughead’s face warms her from the inside out. “Oh, she has _jokes_ ,” he says. “I think I like snowed-in Betty.” He reaches out a hand. “Here, let me take your coat.”

She tucks her hat and scarf into her jacket sleeves and hands it over to him; he accepts it and hangs it neatly over the back of one of the two chairs at his small kitchen table.

“I didn’t realize you lived _this_ close,” she says. “I like your place.”

“Thanks.” Jughead rubs at the back of his neck. “It’s not the nicest and it’s not always the cleanest, but… it works.”

She nods, glancing around and noticing a pile of books stacked next to the sofa, reaching as high as its arm, a record player sitting on a shelf across the room, a framed _Rebel Without a Cause_ poster on the wall.

“I know,” Jughead says when he sees her looking at it, “it’s cliché. I’ve had it since I was fourteen. My sister got it framed for me when I moved out here.”

“That’s sweet.” Betty likes the warmth in his voice when he speaks of his sister; she wonders if Polly used to sound that way, talking about her.

“She can be a sweet kid when she feels like it,” Jughead agrees. “I walked back with the food, so I think we should probably throw it in the microwave for a couple minutes. Can I get you something to drink?”

“Just water would be great, thanks. If you don’t mind, I just need to give my mom a quick call. She’ll be worried, with the storm.”

“‘Course,” Jughead says easily, and she smiles at him before pressing down on the contact labelled _Mom_ in her phone.

“Oh, Betty, good,” Alice says, picking up after the first ring. “I was just thinking of you. You didn’t go into work in this weather, did you?”

“It wasn’t so bad, earlier. We’re closed now.”

“Good. And you got home safely?”

“Um - ” Betty moves a bit further from Jughead, glancing briefly in his direction. She contemplates telling her mother where she is, but Alice would have so many questions, none of which Betty wants to answer right now. “Yes. It’s snowy, but I was fine.”

“You stay warm, sweetheart. Don’t go out again until the roads clear up.”

“Yeah, I know. Are you okay, Mom?”

“Oh, yes. I have some library books.”

Betty feels a pang for the woman her mother used to be - always probing for answers, fingers flying across her keyboard, glasses perched on her nose, forever demanding more. The mother Betty grew up with would never be content to sit at home reading dog-eared romance novels from the library, not even in the midst of a blizzard.

“Okay,” she says. “That’s good. And you remember how the generator works?”

“Yes, Elizabeth,” her mother says, a hint of that old bite coming back into her voice. “I’m still in possession of all my faculties.”

“Okay. Stay warm. I love you. You can call me if you need to.”

“I love you, too, honey. Put an extra blanket on your bed tonight.”

When she hangs up, Betty finds that Jughead’s heaped pad thai onto two plates and poured glasses of water. “Everything good at home?” he asks.

“Yes. Thanks for the food - it smells really good.”

He nods, divvying up the spring rolls. “This place is becoming a favourite of mine.”

“Have you tried Citizen Thai?” When he shakes his head, she says, “It’s not particularly close - it’s in Golden - but it’s worth the trek. We should go sometime.”

“That would be great,” Jughead says with real enthusiasm in his voice. He hands her a plate and a glass. “You’re the guest, so you choose - should we start with your subpar movie pick, or my superior one?”

Betty gives her eyes a little roll. “We can start with yours. I’m a big believer in saving the best for last.”

Jughead gets the film started as they settle in on the couch. It’s a comfortably worn-in piece of furniture, and the cushions sink beneath her weight just the right amount.

As the movie begins, Jughead holds out his glass to her. “To the snow,” he says.

“To the snow,” Betty echoes, touching her glass to his. She lets her eyes linger on his for a long moment, and then she takes a sip.

 

 

When the movie ends, they carry their dinner dishes into the kitchen, and Jughead denies all three of Betty’s offers to wash them. He puts a bag of popcorn in the microwave and shoos her, not unkindly, back toward the couch.

She sits back down, hugging her arms loosely around herself. She’s wearing a cardigan over a knee-length dress - she wasn’t lying to her mother; the weather really hadn’t been too bad when she’d left home in the morning - and though her tights are wool, she’s starting to get cold, especially with her boots off. When Jughead returns to the couch with the popcorn, she touches the throw blanket resting over its backrest and asks, “Do you mind if I… ”

“No, of course not, go ahead. Sorry, I should’ve figured you’d be getting cold.”

Betty shakes her head. “You can’t read my mind.”

“No,” Jughead sets the bowl of popcorn down between them, watching as she pulls her feet up onto the sofa and tucks the blanket around her thighs. “I can’t.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“I’m sure it’s an interesting world in there,” he says, reaching out a hand as if he’s going to touch her head, but ultimately resting it against the back of the couch instead.

“No more interesting than yours, I’m sure.”

“Eh, you wouldn’t want to spend much time in here.” He taps a finger against his temple. “The things I read - it gets pretty dark.”

Betty tucks her hands under the blanket, too. “Does it ever scare you?” she asks quietly. “All that… darkness?”

“All the time,” he says. “Sometimes I don’t know if it’s something we're meant to understand. But I guess I felt equipped to try.”

“Do you still feel equipped?”

He thinks about it for a beat. “Some days.”

“And on the days that you don’t - what do you do?”

There is something raw in his expression, a trust in his eyes that takes her breath away, when he says, “Usually… I get a coffee.”

 

 

About thirty minutes into _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , Betty notices Jughead rubbing absently at his arms, like he’s feeling cold. She waits until the second time he does it to consider saying something. It’s his apartment, so he could just go get a sweater, but -

But there was something about the trust in his eyes earlier - she’s trying to trust him that much, too. She _wants_ to trust him, even if it scares her. So she takes a breath and untucks one edge of the blanket from around her legs, lifting it up. “Want some blanket?”

He turns toward her, his eyes flickering with images reflected from the television. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He sets the bowl that had held the popcorn, empty except for stray kernels, down on the coffee table, and inches closer, accepting the edge of the blanket that she offered and pulling it over his own body. “Thanks.”

She gives him a little smile in response, and he shifts around a bit, making himself comfortable. His thigh presses briefly against her knee, and Betty all but jumps, shifting away to give him more room.

“I’m sorry,” Jughead says quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to - ”

“No, I know,” she replies, her words just as rushed as his; she doesn’t want him to feel bad. She wills her heart to stop racing.

More slowly, Jughead says, “I really wasn’t trying to…”

“I know,” she assures him again. “I didn’t think you were. I just - it was - it was instinct, I guess. Don’t worry about it, Jughead.”

“Okay,” he says softly. Despite the fact that the TV is the only source of light in the room, she can see something sad in his face, in the downturn of one corner of his mouth, in the seriousness of the single crease running across his forehead. It would make her bristle if it weren’t for the way that look on his face seems to engulf her. It isn’t pity, a judgment of something he cannot fathom. It’s empathy, reaching out to her, seeking to understand.

Betty drags her eyes back to the television and pulls her knees up to her chest. She breathes a quiet sigh as her pulse finally stops pounding.

 

 

By the time the movie ends, Scout tucked into Atticus’ arms, the power has flickered twice and Betty’s eyelids are heavy. When she sneaks a glance in Jughead’s direction, she thinks that he looks tired, too, but it’s a different sort of tiredness than she’s used to seeing on his face. That’s a tiredness that will probably fade, eventually, with determination and caffeine, while this is a sleepiness that he’ll give in to. It’s a strikingly intimate thing to see on someone else’s face, the tiredness that will carry them into their dreams.

“You okay?” he murmurs, and she realizes that she’s staring.

“Yes. Yeah.” Betty covers her mouth as she yawns. “I love that movie.”

“It’s hard not to.”

She tilts her head. “Was that you admitting that my pick was the better book-to-film adaptation?”

“Nice try,” he chuckles, and pushes himself to his feet. He stretches out his arms, and she catches a glimpse of his abdomen, of the waistband of his underwear. “Are you tired?” At her nod, he holds a hand out to her. “I’ll show you my room.”

“Oh - ” Betty releases his hand once she’s on her feet, and smooths down the wrinkled skirt of her dress. “No, Jughead, don’t be - don’t be silly. I’ll sleep here.”

“You’re the guest,” he says, shaking his head. “You take the bed.”

“I don’t want to put you out,” she says firmly. “Your couch is comfortable; I don’t mind at all.”

“You’ll be warmer in my room, under the comforter. C’mon, Betty. I insist.”

“ _I_ insist. You’ve already saved me from the storm, fed me dinner, admitted that my movie was better than yours - ”

His grin is sudden and sweet. “I did no such thing. Let’s not argue about it, okay? You’re the guest, you’re here because I invited you - what kind of asshole would I be if I made a girl sleep on my couch, which is not nearly as comfortable as you’re pretending it is? What would Atticus Finch say?”

“Jughead - ”

“Come on,” he says again, coaxingly, and begins to lead the way down the short hallway.

Betty follows reluctantly, still feeling like she really _should_ sleep on the sofa. She steps into his bedroom very carefully, as though expecting the floor to crumble under her feet.

Jughead’s bedroom is pretty sparse, containing only a bed, a small nightstand, and a dresser that has two misaligned drawers. There’s nothing on the walls except a whiteboard that lists reminders and deadlines in thin writing that’s hardly legible.

“There’s the comforter and also a sheet on the bed,” he says. “If I’d known you were coming I would’ve washed everything, of course, but - I did all my bedding last weekend, so none of it should, uh, smell too bad or anything. I hope you’ll be warm enough; I could give you some socks or a sweater or - ” He stops, his eyes moving slowly down her body. “Actually, do you want different clothes to sleep in?”

Betty’s immediate instinct is to say no, but she finds herself hesitating. It feels like it would be some sort of statement to agree to wearing Jughead’s clothes, but her tights will undoubtedly be uncomfortable to sleep in, and if she goes to bed in her dress it’ll definitely wrinkle to the point where she needs to get it dry-cleaned. “Um,” she says. “Okay. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” he says firmly, and walks over to his dresser, where he yanks open one of the drawers with a bit of effort. From it, he extracts a t-shirt and a pair of pyjama pants, and then he wrestles that drawer closed before opening another, from which he grabs a pair of socks. He hands all three items of clothing to her. “Here you go.”

“Thank you, Jughead,” she says softly.

“Sleep tight, Betty,” he replies, his voice gentle, and then he leaves the room, the door clicking shut behind him.

Carefully, she sets the clothes he gave her down on the bed. The socks are thick and black, the PJ pants have a navy-and-black plaid print, and the t-shirt is a greenish-grey with a letter _S_ screen-printed on its front. It looks well-loved, that shirt; the _S_ is fading away in places, the result of many wears and washes. She traces a fingertip lightly along its curves, wondering what it might mean to him.

She removes her cardigan, dress, tights, and bra, folding each item and arranging them in a neat pile that she sets atop the dresser. The floor is cold beneath her feet so she puts on the socks first, then slips into the pyjama pants and ties them tightly at her hips, and then pulls the t-shirt on over her head. Jughead’s pyjamas don’t feel all that different than her own, the cotton soft and warm, the faint scent of laundry detergent clinging to their threads.

She climbs into the bed cautiously, as though there might be something hiding under the blankets, waiting to grab her. It is, admittedly, a relief to snuggle beneath his blue comforter, tucking it up to her chin. She switches off the lamp and curls up on her side, her face pressing into a pillow. She wonders if this is the same side of the bed he sleeps on. The thought sends a pulse of something through her body, so she pushes it away.

The bedsheets don’t smell at all, like Jughead worried they might. They carry a faint scent, but it’s just the scent of _him_ : the slightly-musty fragrance of library books, a hint of coffee beans, the unmistakable musk of deodorant.

Sleep comes easy.

 

 

In the morning, Betty doesn’t even dare to tiptoe to the bathroom to pee before she changes. She repeats the process from last night, this time removing and folding all of Jughead’s clothes, even the socks, and putting yesterday’s outfit back on. There isn’t a mirror in the bedroom, so she combs out her hair with her fingers and hopes it’s not too much of a disaster.

Once she ventures out into the main living area, she discovers that Jughead’s not yet awake. She slips into the bathroom, eases a couple tangles out of her hair, and debates squeezing a bit of his toothpaste onto her finger and rubbing it over her teeth, but it feels far too presumptuous. She imagines the toothpaste tube skimming along his toothbrush, and then his toothbrush going into his mouth, moving over his tongue - and she just can’t. She settles for hoping her morning breath isn’t too terrible.

In the kitchen, she peeks into the freezer and is pleased to discover coffee grounds. She locates a pack of filters in the cupboard, spoons in grounds, and adds water to his coffeemaker. As it bubbles and spurts, she looks out the window and finds the world blanketed with snow, the sky clear.

Jughead’s coffeemaker isn’t particularly speedy, so Betty allows herself to wander out of the kitchen and into the living room. Jughead is breathing in the deep, slow rhythm of sleep, his face almost entirely pressed to the back of the couch, the blanket halfway on the floor. His hair is a tousled mess, and her fingers twitch with the desire to smooth it.

Instead, she tiptoes past him and regards the _Rebel Without a Cause_ poster on the wall for a long moment, smiling faintly. It fits with the teenage version of Jughead that she can imagine.

She notices a record sleeve sitting next to his record player, and goes over to see what he’s been listening to. It’s The Smiths - ‘Strangeways, Here We Come.’ As she’s looking at the shot of Richard Davalos on the sleeve, she hears rustling, and she turns around to see Jughead sitting up, rubbing a hand over his face, which is creased from his pillow.

“Sorry,” she says, putting the record sleeve back. “Did I wake you?”

He shakes his head, his eyes groggy. “Do I smell caffeine?”

Betty nods. “Coffee’s brewing.”

“You’re off the clock, you know,” he says, kicking the blanket aside and getting to his feet. He’s wearing sweatpants and yesterday’s shirt, and he moves toward her in bare feet, pushing a pair of glasses on. She likes the sight of those glasses on his face far more than she should, her heart all but trilling in her chest.

Jughead smiles sleepily when he sees what she’s been looking at. “D’you like that album?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it,” she admits, and then nods to the collection on his shelf - ‘The Smiths,’ ‘Meat is Murder,’ ‘The Queen is Dead.’ “They’re a favourite of yours, huh?”

He nods, rubbing a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I like The Smiths.” He casts a glance in her direction. “In all permutations, I guess.”

Betty blushes, and is saved, mercifully, by the beeping of the coffeemaker.

 

 

It’s only a few days later, on Wednesday, that Betty is on UDenver’s campus, walking at a brisk pace and weaving her way through groups of students. She’s been coming to this campus every second Wednesday for five years now, but it’s only recently that she’s grown worried about who might see her there. She thinks, however, that she doesn’t really have to worry - Jughead has never showed up at Shots! in the late afternoons on Wednesdays when she’s working, and Toni hasn’t reported seeing him on the two Wednesdays a month that Betty works half-days. She figures that he must be busy with his grad school work on Wednesdays, ensconced in a classroom, or in the library, or even off doing some kind of fieldwork.

The chances of running into him, she figures, are really quite slim in the grand scheme of things.

She opens the door of Margery Reed Hall, and makes her way down to the basement, where her feet carry her on autopilot into a classroom. The desks inside it are pushed against the walls, as always; on one of them rests an ancient coffeemaker, a stack of paper cups, and a box of unappetizing donuts from the grocery store, as always.

The psychologist who runs the group, Bea, says a warm hello. Other familiar faces offer greetings too: Evelyn, Rachel, Timothy. Betty returns everyone’s _hello_ s and _how are you_ s and takes her usual place in one of the chairs that form a circle in the centre of the room, waiting for the session to begin.

The group is for the family members of violent offenders, people who are criticized and even villainized by the media, people who don’t feel they have a right to acknowledge their own suffering, people who struggle with having known and loved someone who could never really be known, who may not have deserved to be loved. The website Betty found the group on listed it as FSG(V), but Cheryl’s always called it Bad Dads Anonymous, and now Betty refers to it that way, too, at least in her own head.

As ever, Cheryl swans in at the last possible moment, just as the classroom’s clock is counting down the seconds to exactly 3:00 p.m. She takes the seat next to Betty and crosses her legs, one thigh-high red boot sliding over the other, before reaching into her handbag and extracting a mint green box from Laudurée.

She opens the box and holds it out to Betty. “Macaron, ma cherie?”

Betty selects a pink one - rose flavoured - and Bea says, “Let’s get started.”

 

 

Ninety minutes later, when the support group meeting is over, Betty watches the other members of Bad Dads Anonymous put themselves back together. Evelyn wipes at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief, blinking frantically, and Timothy dumps some protein powder into a bottle, like he can force strength back into his body. Cheryl, who allowed herself to slump slightly against the back of her plastic chair, straightens herself up again, her spine snapping back into alignment one vertebra at a time. Like everyone else, Betty has a routine to complete before re-entering the world: she pulls the elastic out of her hair, rubs briefly at her scalp, and then ties her hair back up in a new, even perkier ponytail.

Cheryl checks her makeup in a compact mirror, then snaps it closed. “I have a wax,” she tells Betty, her apologetic tone indicating that this means she won’t be able to offer Betty a ride home today.

“I can walk,” Betty says easily. The weather is decent, and she should be able to make it home before it’s pitch dark.

Cheryl scrunches up her nose. “Are you sure?” Her eyebrows fly up with an eagerness that usually does not bode well for Betty. “Why don’t you come with me? I’m _certain_ Cynthia could squeeze you in.”

“I’m good, Cheryl. But thanks.”

Cheryl casts a skeptical look in the direction of the zipper of Betty’s jeans. “Are you? No judgment, B, but I know it’s been a long time, and T.T.’s mentioned that that boy has been spending a _lot_ of time at Shots!. You want to create a… hospitable environment for him, don’t you?”

Betty scowls, her cheeks suddenly viciously hot. “I - my environment is hospitable,” she mumbles.

Wearing a clearly unconvinced expression, Cheryl says, “Well. If you change your mind, I can call Cynthia for you. She’s the best.”

“I need to leave this conversation now,” Betty says with half a laugh. “Have a good night, Cher.”

“Text me to let me know you got home safely.”

Betty sighs, feeling town between exasperation and affection, as she so often does with Cheryl. “I will.”

 

 

Her feet move more slowly as she exits Margery Reed than they did when she entered the building, some part of her still lost in the past, tangled in a web of memories that she’s grown accustomed to but has yet to make peace with.

The fog of her brain is pierced sharply, however, in no time at all - by the familiar sight of a worn, grey beanie.

Anxiety prickles along her skin, but Betty orders herself to be calm. It’s not like he’s looking for her. She pulls her phone out of her purse and looks at it intently, trying to blend into the students moving across UDenver’s campus.

An inquisitive “Betty?” tells her that her attempt at being unnoticeable has failed. She breathes a very quick, “ _Shit,_ ” and then turns around.

“Jughead!” She plans to summon up a smile, but before she can, she discovers that there’s already one spreading over her lips, completely unprompted. “Hi.”

“Hey.” He smiles back at her as he closes the distance between them; they both shuffle off to the side of the path they’re on to avoid blocking traffic. “What’re you doing on campus?”

“I was… looking for you,” she says, which is the only plausible explanation, aside from the truth. “I had some errands to run nearby and I thought I might catch you around here. I was about to text you.” She lifts her phone like it’s some kind of proof.

“Well,” Jughead says. “You caught me.”

She can see what he’s thinking in his face, and what he’s thinking is, _she likes me._ All of Betty’s previous hesitance, all of the moments when their closeness scared her and she inched back, all those things that might have left him with questions - here she is, providing him with an answer in this lie disguised as an assertive gesture. She said she was going to text him to make plans; she said she even _came to his university_ just in case she might _happen to catch him_.

Whatever they are, the two of them, he thinks that she’s in it.

And to Betty’s complete shock - she finds that she doesn’t entirely mind.

“I thought we might check out Citizen Thai,” she says. “If you don’t have anything else planned for tonight.”

“No, I don’t,” he says. “I was going to eat a frozen pizza alone in my apartment. Thai food with you sounds like a much better evening.”

“Okay,” she says, biting her bottom lip. “Great. We’ve got to get to the E, so we just need to find a bus.” She glances around, trying to map the best route in her mind.

“Lead the way,” Jughead says easily.

“Okay,” Betty says again, and as they step back into the flow of student traffic, she feels Jughead’s fingers brush against hers, his knuckles just a little rough against her skin.

A couple seconds after they break contact, she returns the gesture, letting the pads of her index and middle fingers brush against his palm. Taking her hint, he begins to curl his hand around hers, but Betty stiffens her fingers, stopping his movement, and slides her palm in line with his instead, their heart and sun and head and fate and life lines pressed together for a beat before she weaves her fingers between his and takes a firm hold of his hand.

There is something about his grip, its tenderness and surety, that prevents Betty from pretending that the stinging in her eyes is only from the wind.

 

 

tbc.


	5. Chapter 5

Jughead holds a heavy wool sweater up to the daylight that streams through the window of his bedroom. “I dunno, Betty,” he says skeptically, squinting at it. “I didn’t _think_ I was colourblind, but isn’t the key colour for St. Patrick’s Day supposed to be green?”

He turns to Betty, who is perched on the edge of his mattress with her hands folded politely in her lap. Her expression is caught between amusement and sheepishness. “Yes,” she answers. “Ordinarily, yes.”

“Okay,” he says slowly, looking once more at the decidedly _not_ green sweater that he’s holding. “So why am I wearing _red_?”

 

 

It starts a couple of days after the snowstorm that trapped Betty in his apartment overnight passes.

Jughead is in the middle of further preparation for a new offender interview when he receives her text. He is, for a change, not at the coffee shop; instead, he’s holed up back at his apartment, because on today’s preparation agenda is _review crime scene photos,_ and he knows he can’t stare at the butchered bodies of the Black Hood Killer’s victims while he’s sitting in a public coffee shop.

The Black Hood Killer - Harold “Hal” Cooper, to be specific - both interests and terrifies Jughead. Like all of the other murderers he’s researched or interviewed, his crimes appear to have been committed in the pursuit of abnormal psychological gratification. What that specific psychology is, and how it had developed - or didn’t develop, in some cases - speaks to the broader point of Jughead’s project. He’s fascinated by the overlap in the motivations of his sample group, and how easily some of them can be corralled together according to what had driven them: hedonism, lust and sexual gratification, a pseudo-religious vision, or - in the Black Hood’s case - a deeply misplaced sense of mission and purpose.

Jughead has seen the arrest videos. “Sinners have to die,” Cooper had told the police then. “We must do better.”

Jughead clicks to see a photo of a young teacher who Cooper had garrotted. She was alleged to have been engaging in sexually predatory relationships with underage high school boys, and rather than report those suspicions to the police, Cooper had decided to take matters into his own hands. It had been the beginning of a multi-victim spree that ended with his arrest at his home in Loveland, in front of his wife and children.

Jughead’s been waiting for approval to interview the Black Hood Killer for weeks. The personal psychological angle is interesting to him, as is what makes him somewhat unique, at least initially: he had a family. He held a job. He was an upstanding citizen who’d suppressed his violent urges for years until they broke him, with so many others as tragic collateral.

Furthermore, he’s housed at a maximum security institution in Florence, Colorado, mere hours from the town where he’d lived, in the state that he’d terrorized. It must be hard, Jughead muses, for the families of his victims to find closure when he’s still sort of in the neighbourhood.

He’s just closed out of the photo of the teacher when his phone buzzes. A message from Betty comes across the screen; he can’t help his smile as he opens it.

_**Are you stopping by the coffee shop at all today, by chance? I’ve got something I want to ask you.** _

He hadn’t planned on it, but right now nothing sounds better than leaving serial killers aside to go see Betty. Nothing’s happened between them apart from some innocent (but exciting) handholding; he senses her reticence for anything further and so isn’t going to push it, but - well, he wouldn’t be opposed if something _did_ happen, because she’s smart and interesting and beautiful, and he likes her a lot. He’s trying to make it clear - albeit gently and without any expectation, which is sort of a hard balance to strike - that he’s an option, if she’s looking.

And if she isn’t, then hey, he would truly love a new friend. Jughead thinks they might already be halfway there.

 _ **The answer is yes, I’ll accept your apology and I’m glad you’ve conceded that**_ **The Age of Innocence _is the superior choice,_** he texts back, as he grabs his jacket and heads out the door.

Jughead is at the door of Shots! (Of Espresso) when Betty’s response comes. He opens it just before entering and chuckles at **_it’s so sad to watch your mind deteriorate like this._** Betty is cleaning tables off to one side when he walks in, and he heads straight over to her.

She sees him coming and laughs at the faux-wounded expression that he fixes on his face. “I’m deteriorating?” he says by way of greeting, pouting out his lip and feeling a little bit like Jellybean as he does so.

Betty smiles and sets her cleaning cloth down as he approaches. “Hey, you had a good run,” she says with a playful wink. “Did you just come down because I texted?”

Jughead briefly considers saying no, he was going to stop by anyway, he didn’t make a special trip just for her - which is obviously the choice that makes him look a little smoother - but then decides against it. He likes her and he doesn’t care if she knows it.

“Yeah.”

She bites her lip against a widening smile. “You didn’t have to - I could’ve caught you tomorrow, or when you came in next.”

Jughead shrugs and leans against the table that she’d just cleaned. His knee brushes against her leg slightly. “You say that like it’s a chore to come see you.” He reaches out and hooks the tip of his index finger into the wide, flat pocket of her apron. “Believe me, Betty. It’s not.”

“Oh,” Betty breathes softly. Her eyes fall to his hand and then rise to meet his; she smiles. “I’m glad. Are you busy on the 17th?”

Jughead racks his brain; he doesn’t have anything planned, not specifically, and if he’s counting properly, that’s a Saturday. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Want to go to a party with me at Cheryl’s?” she asks, hurriedly adding, “Toni will be there and a few other people you might recognize from here.”

He grins. “You’re going to let me meet Cheryl?” he teases. “I thought you were protecting me from her.”

Betty lets out a little huff. “Yeah, well - Cheryl’s will can only be denied for so long.” She presses her lips together. “If it’s not your thing, I get it. It’s not really _my_ thing either, but sometimes it’s easier be a joiner…”

Jughead slides his finger out from her apron pocket and catches Betty’s hand instead. “I’m in,” he cuts in, squeezing her fingers lightly before dropping them. He makes note of her flushed but happy face and and is considering taking her hand again when the loud voice of her manager interrupts his thoughts.

“Smith!” he hollers. “I’m not paying you to flirt with the customers!”

Jughead feels immediate embarrassment, but to her credit, Betty just rolls her eyes. “I’ll be right there, Sweet Pea,” she calls back, before turning to Jughead again.

“Sorry,” he apologizes. “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“You aren’t, he doesn’t care. He’s just being an ass. But I _should_ get back to work.” She brushes her knuckles against his thigh, just briefly, then picks up her cleaning cloth again. “I’ll text you the details.”

 

 

And she had - including the date, time, location, the _name_ of the party (“A Blossom Celebration of St. Patrick’s Day”), and a directive that she’d get a Lyft over to his place beforehand so that they could go together - but somehow, despite all of the information provided, Betty neglected to inform Jughead that this particular St. Patrick’s Day had a very odd theme: red.

“Red is Cheryl’s signature colour,” Betty informs him, shrugging. “So - St. Patrick’s Day, but red.”

“St. Patrick’s Day but red,” Jughead repeats, incredulous. He still hasn’t met Cheryl, but she’s already been made into quite a character in his head. “That’s … bold.”

“Cher is bold.”

Jughead nods. “Mm.” He waves a hand at Betty’s outfit - a taupe long-sleeved sweater tucked into a short skirt in a deep red colour with sheer black tights. “So that explains the skirt.”

Betty smooths her hands over her lap. “Yeah, sorry. I’m glad you have a red sweater, otherwise - well, I don’t actually know what we’d have done. Buy one, probably.”

“I could’ve just borrowed your skirt.”

“Might’ve looked better on you,” she teases, standing up to allow him to change.

Jughead’s eyes follow her as she walks to his bedroom door. It’s not completely out of left field, her outfit: she sometimes wears dresses and skirts to work at the coffee shop, but none of them are quite like this one. Similarly, she seems perpetually to live in thin, soft sweaters, but the way that this one hugs her body feels new.

In the ten minutes that she’s been at his apartment, he’s already failed to stop himself from checking her out four times; he’s pretty sure she’d caught him on at least one of those occasions.

“I don’t know about that,” he says. “I don’t have the legs for it.”

 

 

Cheryl Blossom’s condo is, in a word, opulent.

It’s in a high-rise building downtown that even he, an out-of-state transplant, knows is expensive. The foyer and elevators feel modern, so while Jughead is en route to the penthouse, he assumes that her apartment will be, too. And so, when the door opens and he’s ushered inside, he’s caught off guard by an ornate, decadent, gothic, and very old-world kind of wealth - one made of gold, dark wood, and silk.

The redheaded girl who Jughead recognizes from the coffee shop as being Cheryl appears seemingly out of thin air and plants herself in front of himself and Betty.

“Hello Betty dearest,” she greets, leaning in and pecking Betty on both cheeks. “I must say, while I admire your dedication to a peter pan collar, I’m glad to see you embrace a v-neck tonight. And I’m sure your companion agrees.”

Jughead’s face feels hot. “Uh -”

“I’m Cheryl,” she interjects, holding her hand out as though she were the queen and he’s expected to kneel before her. “Pleasure to finally meet you, darling Betty has been hiding you away.”

“I haven’t been _hiding_ anyone,” Betty insists. She nods toward the living area, which is decked out with balloons, flowers, and several groupings of clover, all somehow dyed red. “The place looks great.”

“Marcus, my decorator, really outdid himself this time,” Cheryl agrees, looking around proudly. “How I so wish Jason could be here to see it - we always discussed a red March 17th.”

Jughead isn’t sure who Jason is; he glances at Betty, but there is an unreadable expression on her face, almost as if she can’t breathe. He looks at Cheryl. “Sorry, who is Jason?”

Cheryl raises her eyebrows, first at Jughead and then at Betty. “Betty, have you told him nothing about me?”

She shrugs somewhat miserably. “That’s your story to tell, Cheryl.”

“Ah well, it’s no secret, is it?” Cheryl examines one long, manicured fingernail before thrusting her hand to the side, where a flute of champagne is almost immediately provided to her. “Jason is my twin brother. We were _inseparable -_ at least until he tried to go up against our father, and Daddy shot him in the head.”

 _Oof._ Jughead feels like he’s just been punched. Cheryl’s words come out so nonchalantly that for a second, he wonders if she’s making some kind of bad joke, but a glance to Betty’s saddened face is all the confirmation that he needs. He blinks, his mind racing, and swallows. “I’m so sorry, Cheryl.”

“I’ve compartmentalized.” Cheryl glances at his face, very briefly, then looks past him. Her face breaks into a smile. “T.T.!” she exclaims. “You look ravishing, darling.”

Toni, Betty’s coworker, slides up beside Cheryl and tucks an arm around the hostess’s waist. They are both decked out in head-to-toe red, although Toni’s is accompanied by some type of black leather harness accessory, and he spots a red flannel shirt over top of the back of a nearby chair. “That’s what you said this morning, too.”

“Well, you weren’t wearing anything this morning, so I _really_ meant it then,” Cheryl purrs, dragging a long fingernail beneath Toni’s chin and tipping it upward for a kiss.

Beside him, Betty clears her throat. “We’re going to get a drink, Cheryl,” she says loudly. “See you guys later.” Without waiting for a response, she tugs on the sleeve of Jughead’s thick sweater, the only red item that he owns - even his plaid is blue tones - and leads him toward the kitchen area, where a bar is set up.

“This place is insane,” he says in a low voice to Betty, who nods.

“She had the whole place redone to match her family home. They’re very dedicated to their aesthetic, the Blossoms.” Betty approaches the bar, orders a gin and tonic, then steps to the side to allow Jughead to approach.

“Wow.” Jughead orders a beer and looks around again. “That’s commitment.” He’s not a huge drinker, owing mostly to the experience of watching his parents struggle with temperance, but he’s getting the sense from one brief interaction with Cheryl that this might be the kind of evening where alcohol is warranted.

They take their drinks and wander through the condo, with Betty giving Jughead a sort of informal tour. There’s a second level - a half-level, Betty calls it, where the master bedroom and closets (“yes, closet _s_ ,” she emphasizes) are - as well as a game room, formal dining room, and a beautiful, perfectly-lit balcony with the most expensive-looking patio furniture that Jughead has ever seen. The door to the balcony, she tells him, is the exact door that led to the balcony of her childhood bedroom; Cheryl had just liked it, and had gotten it moved.

“It’s a castle in the sky,” Jughead declares. They’ve found themselves in the living room, sharing what he thinks is technically a fainting couch.

Betty laughs softly. “Yeah,” she agrees. “It’s not my style at all, but different things make different people happy.”

Jughead nods his head toward Toni and Cheryl, where they are still entwined, this time talking to a shorter man that he recognizes as Sweet Pea’s boyfriend. “They seem happy.”

“They are,” Betty says earnestly. “They’re really good for each other. Cheryl’s had a hard go of it, as you heard, and support and loyalty are important to her. Toni’s little, but she’d hold Cheryl up for days if she needed. And vice versa. They make each other happy.”

Jughead can tell by the way he speaks about her friends that she really cares for them. “That’s nice,” he says, and means it. He turns to look at Betty. “What makes _you_ happy?”

The question seems to paralyze Betty for a beat. “A lot of things,” she finally answers. “A good book. Orange flowers. Chocolate croissants. The perfect latte.” She hesitates, then with a small smile, adds, “Lately, you.”

Warmth spreads through Jughead’s chest and stomach. He fights the urge to lean in and kiss her; instead, he returns the smile as he reaches over and squeezes her knee, then stands up. “I’ll get more drinks. Gin and tonic still?”

Betty’s cheeks are pink as she nods. “Yes please.”

“Be right back,” he promises, making his way through a growing crowd of people to the bar.

There’s a bit of a line, so he gets in the back and shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans while he waits. He sees a bookshelf just beyond the bar and makes a note to return to it afterward; there looks to be a series of old volumes waiting there, and he’s intrigued. If the Blossoms are as wealthy as they appear to be, Jughead wonders how many of them are first editions.

“So what do you think?”

A voice behind him jars him from his reverie. Jughead turns to see Toni grinning up at him, with Cheryl now greeting people at the door again. “Hey,” he says. “Nice place.”

“Thanks,” she laughs. “I mean, I live here, but it’s Cheryl’s. You get a tour?”

“Yeah, Betty gave me a little impromptu one.”

Toni nods. The line moves slightly. “She show you the door Cheryl had moved from her parents’ house?”

Jughead laughs. “Yeah, I gotta say, that’s a first for me.”

Toni grins knowingly. “Was for me too. When Betty showed it to me the first time, I didn’t believe her. It just seemed so over the top. But now knowing Cheryl, I get it.”

“Yeah, it does seem - wait.” Jughead steps forward as the line moves again but turns back to peer at Toni. “Betty showed it to you? I would’ve thought you’d have seen it first.”

“Why’s that?”

“I - I’m not sure.” He racks his brain for an explanation, then draws upon a recent memory. “I guess she never said explicitly, but she kind of made it seem like she knows Cheryl through you.”

Toni shakes her head and chuckles a little, as though the idea of that is absurd. “No way. I _met_ Cheryl through Betty. They’re friends, they -” she stops, seems to recalibrate her thoughts, then says, “they’re old friends.”

Jughead nods in understanding. He’s not a fool; clearly, there’s something else there, but it’s also clearly none of his business. “Cool,” he finally says. Then, mercifully, he reaches the front of the line, so he procures drinks and bids a quick farewell to Toni before returning to Betty on the couch.

 

 

The evening passes at a fairy steady pace. Jughead is having a surprising amount of fun, considering that it’s a party with a large group of people where he only knows one person.

She is, of course, one hell of a person. Even right now, when she’s a little tipsy and arguing the completely wrong point about _The Room_.

“You’re _so_ wrong,” Betty says, pointing a finger at him. “It is categorically bad!”

“I agree that it’s bad,” Jughead shoots back, “but I’m just _saying,_ once people begin to get a certain amount of enjoyment out of its state of being, doesn’t that start to make it good?”

Betty raises her eyebrows and shakes her head fervently at him. “No! It doesn’t! The acting is still terrible, the storyline makes _no_ sense, Tommy Wiseau is a lunatic -”

“All true,” Jughead concedes, setting his third (fourth?) drink down on the coffee table beside them. “But how do you judge whether a movie is good or not? Isn’t it whether it’s enjoyed by audiences?”

“No, it’s on the objective quality of the components of the film, _obviously,_ ” she says, her eyes sparkling.

 _That_ makes Jughead crazy. “What!” he exclaims, lifting his hands up in dramatic exasperation. “What’s objective about film?!”

Betty giggles at the look on his face, which he has to imagine is a little exaggerated. “Everything,” she insists, bumping her leg against his for the umpteenth time this evening. “They’re all objective realities.”

Jughead laughs at the absurdity of that, and, in a move that he definitely wouldn’t have the confidence for if fully sober, he puts his hand on the thigh that she keeps tapping against him. He holds his breath and waits a second to see whether she’s okay with the placement; in response, she shifts her hips in such a way that makes the angle more comfortable for his hand, and he exhales.

He strokes his thumb over the wiry smoothness of her sheer tights. He speaks again, this time lower and only to her instead of dramatically and to anyone within earshot. “So you’re saying you wouldn’t watch _The Room_ with me and throw tomatoes at the screen?”

“Depends,” Betty breathes, her voice airier now. “Are we watching it at your apartment or mine?”

Jughead thinks for a moment, then musters the courage to meet her eyes. “Mine,” he finally decides. “Closer to coffee, and that way it’s my mess to clean after.”

His answer makes Betty smile with her whole face. Her lips widen, her skin crinkles, and her eyes shine. It’s almost too much.

“I would help,” she replies, just as Jughead says, “Wanna know another objective reality?”

Betty quirks an eyebrow playfully. “What’s that?”

Jughead drops his gaze again to his hand on her leg. He squeezes gently and begins to stroke his thumb once more; there’s a pressure in his chest now that he thinks might be overwhelming. “You’re beautiful,” he tells her, the words almost catching in his throat. “And smart and funny and caring, too, but right now you just - you look really pretty. And you should know it.”

She stares at him for a moment. He still can’t read her, but he knows her enough now to know the wheels are turning in her head. He just hopes the gears line up in his favour.

Betty reaches down to her leg, pulls his hand from her thigh, and laces their fingers together. “Let’s go outside,” she says, her voice a near-whisper.

 

 

They settle on one of the patio sofas. It’s empty outside, although the weather has turned favourably recently and Cheryl has heat lamps outdoors. A heavy blanket sits folded neatly on the side of one of the chairs. Jughead picks it up, sits beside Betty on the sofa, and covers their legs with it.

“You warm enough?” he asks. His own voice sounds scratchy, almost throaty, and he barely recognizes it.

Betty considers the question and then shakes her head. She lifts his arm from where it rests between them and slips beneath it, allowing his hand to settle on the soft sleeve covering her upper arm. “Better,” she answers.

Jughead’s heart is pounding. This is uncharted territory for him - it’s been a long time since he’s even dated a girl, with all of his focus on Jellybean, and even longer since he’s been sitting with someone he liked _this_ much, this way.

“It’s really nice outside,” he says to the railing, ten feet in front of them. “I can’t believe it warmed up this much from the blizzard.”

Beside him, Betty shifts even closer beneath the blanket, wiggling so that their legs are touching. He tightens his arm around her shoulders.

“It’s hard to believe it was only a couple of weeks ago,” she agrees.

Jughead turns to look at her. She’s already facing him. Her hair is down and wavy again tonight, and the slight breeze from over the balcony tousles it a bit. He leans closer, consciously stopping about halfway toward her.

“Hey Jughead,” Betty begins, softly, “you know when a song comes on and you just gotta dance?”

He grins. “Did you just use a line from _Blue Valentine_ on me?”

She shrugs, her smile caught between playful and shy. “You’ve been using lines on me all night.”

“Not _all_ night,” he argues, stroking her arm. Then he pauses, waits an intentional beat, and adds, “Why, did any of them work?”

Betty shakes her head. “No,” she answers, leaning a bit closer. “But _The Room_ is a terrible movie.”

She closes the gap between them slowly, like she wants to give both of them time to back out if they need to, but he’s in and she’s in and then _they’re_ in, and he’s kissing her and she’s kissing him back, this witty, smart girl with incorrect opinions about movies that he met at a coffee shop, of all the cliché places.

It’s a nice kiss, soft and warm and short, and when Betty pulls away, her cheeks are flushed again. He doesn’t think it’s from the cold.

The air is quiet between them right afterward. The only thing that fills the millimetres of space between them is the distant sound of honking and traffic noise from the streets so far below.

Jughead lifts his free hand to cup her jaw. “You’re the most interesting wrong person I’ve ever met,” he says, then cuts off her incredulous giggle with another kiss.

 

* * *

 

Betty can’t help but feel like she’s floating, moving through the coffee shop with such buoyancy in her steps that she’s not sure if her feet ever truly touch the ground. She slept so soundly overnight, and she keeps reliving the moments before she flopped down onto her bed and surrendered to peaceful dreams, Jughead’s shoulder propped against her door and his hand gentle on her hip, his thumb stroking absently, pulling the fabric of her sweater upward, almost dislodging it from the waistband of her skirt. Her arms wound their way around his neck as he kissed her sweet and soft, his tongue in her mouth, a sound caught in his throat.

“Goodnight, Betty Smith,” he whispered against her lips, and she kissed him one last time before unlocking her door. She couldn’t stop smiling as she turned off her alarm and re-set it for the night, brushed her teeth, and changed into her pyjamas.

And now, despite her slight headache from failing to rehydrate properly before bed, that smiles keeps threatening to resurface. It breaks out when she tells customers to have a nice day, when she lists out the flavours of herbal tea they have in stock, when she doesn’t charge an exhausted-looking mother with a newborn fussing in a carrier the extra twenty cents for coconut milk in her latte.

“You disappeared for a while last night,” Toni says, each of her eyebrows tilting up in turn.

“Only for a little bit,” Betty says neutrally, keeping her eyes on the counter that she’s wiping down.

Toni snorts, unconvinced, and gulps down the rest of the bright blue sports drink she’s been chugging all morning. “I like him, B,” she says. “He seems like a good egg. And all Cheryl had to say about him was that he could use a better barber. You know Cher - from her, that’s basically a compliment.”

“It is,” Betty has to agree.

“And there’s something else.” Betty’s eyes must flash with something like panic at that, because Toni adds, fairly quickly, “Nothing bad. Something...good, actually, maybe.” She picks at the label on her bottle. “Jughead - he seemed to think that you and Cheryl met through you and me, and something I said made him realize that wasn’t true. But he didn’t push it, like, at all. Seemed like he knew there was a story there that was yours to tell him on your own time.”

“Oh.” Betty twists the cloth she’s holding between her fingers.

“He seems to really respect you. And you totally deserve that.”

Betty’s grip on the cloth relaxes slightly, and she smiles. “Thanks, T.”

Toni nods. “The way he looks at you is _disgusting_ , by the way. Like a fuckin’ heart-eyes emoji.”

Sweet Pea’s head emerges from the back room. “Are we working?” he asks. “Or are we gossiping?”

“Like you can talk, Pea.” Toni waves toward the creases on one of his cheeks. “We can _tell_ you were just back there sleeping off your hangover.”

“It’s your girlfriend’s fault,” he harrumphs. “What were those red drinks she had the bartender making? Those were deadly.”

“Cherry sidecars.” Toni licks her lips, seemingly unconsciously. “Her signature drink.”

Sweet Pea groans. “God, the same ones from the fourth last year? I should’ve known.”

“No matter how red Cheryl tries to make a holiday,” Betty says lightly, “SP always ends up green around the gills.”

Toni chortles and holds out a hand for a high five. Sweet Pea frowns deeply as Betty smacks it lightly with her own hand.

“Don’t laugh at my pain,” he says, and adds, “You’re both fired,” before ducking out of sight again.

“Such a sensitive soul,” Toni laughs, glancing toward the door when its bells chime, signalling that it’s been opened. She grimaces, deeply but briefly, at the sight of their regular customer David, ever convinced that he’s one great dramatic soliloquy away from Hollywood. “Whose turn is it to pretend to care about his screenplay?”

“That,” Betty says happily, handing her friend a freshly-brewed pot of coffee and a mug, “would be you.”

She watches Toni trudge off to great David with false enthusiasm, and finds herself smiling yet again.

 

 

Jughead comes in to Shots! a bit later in the day, messenger bag slung over his shoulder as usual. There is nothing different, not really, about how he looks, or about this day, or about the smell of coffee filling the café, but _everything_ feels different nonetheless. Betty’s not entirely sure how dating works now - in high school she held hands with a boy, and then he kissed her, and then he was her boyfriend, but now everyone’s swiping on apps and nothing seems official without a conversation about exclusivity - but what she is sure about is the way her stomach swoops and the tongs she’s using to rearrange croissants clatter a little bit, her fingers shaking with jitters, like she’s over-caffeinated.

He smiles at her, and she bites her lip, setting down the tongs and closing the display case, meeting him by the cash register, a foot and a half of counter space between them.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hey.” He rests the knuckles of his right hand against the counter. He touched her with that hand last night: her jaw, her cheek, her neck, her hair, her waist, her hip, her thigh -

“Red eye?” she asks, her voice squeaking up into an unnatural pitch on the second word.

“Please,” he says, and she nods, but she doesn’t move. The shirt he’s wearing is a dark grey, and it changes his eyes a little, makes them stormier. She’d like to know every single shade his eyes can be, and the thought makes her heart clench, some weird mix of anticipation and terror. How long would it take her, to learn every single one of those blues? Months, years? Forever?

After a few more seconds of standing there in speechless limbo, Jughead breaks the silence. “I had the strangest dream last night,” he says.

Betty rolls her lips together, not quite sure where he intends for that statement to go. “Oh?”

“Yeah. I was at a St. Patrick’s Day party, but everything was red. What kind of world would that happen in?”

Her lips relax into a smile. “It happens in my world, sometimes. On various holidays.”

“ _Really_ ,” Jughead says, like this is truly news to him. “What else happens in your world, Betty?”

She looks at him for a moment, breathing shallowly, up in her chest. “I - I decorate this place. I change it for holidays, for seasons. That’s what I’m doing tonight, after closing. All the shamrocks have to go.”

“Time for eggs and rabbits?” Jughead guesses.

“Yeah.” She should really be making him his coffee. “I like it, the decorating thing. I’ve only ever had help once, but - that made me like it even more.”

“Did it?” he says, and she can tell by the smile on his face that he’s going to make her ask.

“It did,” she confirms. “We make these really good snickerdoodle cookies in the spring. The first batch is in the oven now - if you want to come by after closing, I’ll set some aside for you.”

The slightest furrow appears between his brows, his eyes growing soft. “You don’t have to bribe me, Betty. Of course I’ll come by at closing. Snickerdoodles or no snickerdoodles.”

“Okay,” she says with a small nod, peeking up at him through her lashes.

He reaches across the counter, takes her hand, and squeezes her fingers, just for a moment. “See you later.”

“See you later,” she agrees, and she watches him make his way to the door, hands tucked into his pockets, messenger bag shifting with each step.

Sweet Pea materializes at her side. “Where’s his coffee?” he asks.

Betty blinks, realizing that she never made Jughead his red eye. “I guess that’s not what he came in for,” she says, more to herself than to her boss, and Sweet Pea throws his hands into the air in exasperation, turning on his heel to go resume his nap.

 

 

After her shift, Betty goes home to eat dinner. She ends up carrying her homemade buddha bowl over to her dresser and setting it down on top, taking the occasional bite in between rifling through her drawers. There’s nothing wrong with the outfit she wore to work, but even though she’ll be returning to Shots! in the evening, she wants to look less like a barista who woke up at 4:45 a.m. and threw on jeans and a sweater and more like the woman she was the night before, the woman whose legs Jughead kept eyeing like they might be his kryptonite.

She settles on a burnt orange t-shirt dress and grey tights with black polka dots so tiny and tight together that they’re only noticeable if one looks closely.

She hopes Jughead will look closely.

Once she’s changed, she kills time before she has to catch the bus by scrolling through her social media and eating a few last bites of quinoa. Cheryl has, predictably, uploaded about a million photographs from her party. Betty smiles at the one she’s tagged in, a close-up shot of her face next to Cheryl’s and Toni’s, captioned _fave babes_ with Cheryl alongside a red heart and a four-leafed clover, and then idly flicks through the rest of the photos.

She’s not in too many; as a child, she disliked getting her photo taken because of how her mother was always barking orders about tilting her chin up or sticking her hip out or sucking her stomach in, and after her father and the following media storm, she developed something akin to a fear of cameras. She catches sight of herself in the background of a few pictures, though, always with Jughead by her side. If she zooms in, past some of Cheryl’s high society friends, she can see his head bent toward hers, his mouth near her ear, and even though they’re not quite in focus, she can see the smile on her own face.

Looking at her happiness, in that photo, she can feel it all over again, in her cheeks, in her chest. She _wants_ it. She wants to be happy, she wants to let _Jughead_ make her happy, and she wants to make him happy, too. But she doesn’t know if happiness can ever be real with a lie of omission hanging over it, under the shadow of something that hasn’t been confessed.

Or maybe she does know. Maybe she’s already learned the answer the hard way.

 

 

The chime of the bells announces Jughead’s arrival at Shots!, a brief burst of sound. Coffee grounds are in the garbage, counters are wiped down, chairs are sitting upside down on tables, and Betty is alone in the peaceful quiet that always descends after closing, when every part of the coffee shop seems to sink into hibernation, wrapping up a ceramic pot of gold in old newspaper.

Jughead is without his messenger bag, his beanie pulled down over his ears to protect them from the cold. “Smells incredible in here,” he says.

“I thought you might think so.” Betty sets the wrapped decoration into the bottom of a cardboard box. “I did save you some of those snickerdoodles.”

He grins, removing his hat and gloves before shrugging out of his coat. “You’re the best,” he says, moving closer to her and setting a hand softly on her hip before he adds, “Hey.”

He presses a kiss to her cheek and Betty smiles faintly. He’s so respectful of her boundaries, so willing to let her set the rules, and it’s because of that respect that they’ve come this far, but she feels ready for more. She’s ready for him to kiss her without it being a question. There’s a craving in her for him that’s crackling through her body, so she turns her face and puts her lips on his, and there’s a shiver that shoots through her mouth and straight down.

His touch on her hip turns to more of a grip as he kisses her back, their mouths moving together, rediscovering the familiarity they’d found the night before. She presses both her hands to his chest, finding the warmth of his skin through the cool fabric of his shirt.

“Hey,” she whispers back when they break apart to breathe.

And then they’re kissing again, his other hand landing on her other hip, his tongue sweeping into her mouth. One of his hands moves upward, tracing the curve of her body, following the dip of her waist. He leaves that hand beneath her breast for a long, long moment, and it’s not until she nips his bottom lip in a way she hopes he’ll understand to mean _hurry up_ that he slides his hand up further to palm her breast, and from the soft, kneading pressure of his fingers alone, Betty’s knees nearly buckle. Her back arches, her body pressing as close to his as possible, and his unoccupied hand is quick to press into the small of her back, keeping her there.

Jughead groans into her mouth, and suddenly her thighs are pressed back against one of the café tables, and it’s dark outside of Shots!’s many windows and inside the lights are on and _anyone_ walking by could see this, could see them making out and feeling each other up, but Betty desperately doesn’t want to stop.

“God,” Jughead murmurs, dipping his head to kiss along her jaw, his fingertips tracing the lace of her bra through her dress, and when Betty’s eyes flutter open, her gaze lands on the door to the coffee shop’s accessible, gender-neutral washroom.

The washroom’s been cleaned, she knows, since it’s the end of the day. They’d have privacy, a door closed and locked between them and the rest of the world. She could let Jughead see her bra; she could even let him take it off. She could learn how the contours of his bare back and shoulders feel beneath her hands. She’s not ready for a home run in the baseball metaphor of sex, but they could make a run for second base.

“Okay?” Jughead asks, sounding short of breath, pushing back her hair as he looks into her face.

“Yes,” she breathes, and presses a series of soft kisses to his mouth, not letting any of them deepen. Sometimes she wonders how she features in her high school boyfriend’s autobiography. Is the story _yeah, I had a girlfriend in high school; she was sweet, kind of a goody-two-shoes_? Or is it _no way, man, I have the craziest sex story - I fucked the Black Hood’s daughter_? She doesn’t know, and she probably never will, but she knows _exactly_ what kinds of lines she doesn’t want in Jughead’s story.

“Just - the windows,” she murmurs, carding her fingers through his hair, hoping he’ll understand how much she really does want him. “We’re kind of putting on a show.”

“Right,” he says, somewhat sheepish, but his hand stays on her breast. She’s discovered yet another blue his eyes hold: the deep, dark navy of lust.

When Jughead finally removes his hands from her, he does so slowly, with reluctance. Betty thinks he might be blushing, just a little - there’s a sweep of red over both his cheeks.

“We should probably be decorating, huh?” he asks.

She nods, smoothing out her dress with careful fingers, and then points to the boxes set on a nearby table. “Easter and spring stuff’s in those,” she says, and she smiles at him with the same sort of sheepishness that’d been in his voice. “I’ll go get your cookies.”

 

 

By the time the week’s meeting of Bad Dads Anonymous rolls around, Shots! (Of Espresso) is decked out in pastel lavenders, baby blues, soft pinks, and mint greens that Sweet Pea says are a daily assault on his eyeballs, and Betty’s been alone with Jughead once more: the previous night, in her apartment, watching _Sunset Boulevard_ , both of them atop her bed’s comforter. They were making out by the time the credits rolled, and Jughead ended up on top of her, and when she felt him hard between her legs she’d choked out, “I work the early shift tomorrow.”

(“I’m not trying to rush you,” he’d said, lips soft on her collarbone, and Betty was so turned on she could’ve screamed. Instead, she’d given his shoulder a couple decidedly chaste pats and promised him, “You’re not, Jug, not at all.”)

Predictably, Cheryl arrives at the group just as they’re getting started, in a cloud of Coco Mademoiselle. “We’re going to dinner after this,” she tells Betty and she removes her red wool coat. “I made a reservation at Beatrice & Woodsley.”

Betty huffs an exasperated sigh. “I could have _plans_ , Cheryl.”

“Do you?” Cheryl asks, looking at her with sharp eyes. “With the new boy toy?”

Betty doesn’t dignify that with a response, rolling her eyes instead, but she decides to take the path of least resistance and do what Cheryl wants. She sits through the meeting, speaking up only twice, and when the session is done she takes out her ponytail, reconstructs it, hugs Evelyn and thanks the other girl for the difficult sharing she did, and then follows Cheryl out of the classroom.

The groups of students that Betty has to weave between whenever she’s navigating through UDenver’s campus part to make room for Cheryl, unable to ignore the way her eyes are steadily fixed ahead and the sharp _click-clack_ of her heeled boots.

There is, of course, a black car waiting, and at the restaurant Cheryl is, of course, recognized immediately and greeted as _Ms. Blossom_ , and they’re ushered to a table where a bottle of wine (red, of course) is already waiting.

Cheryl settles into her chair with a contented sigh as the waiter pours their wine. When he leaves, she reaches for Betty’s menu, says, “I’ll order,” and then plucks up her glass, taking a dainty sip. “So,” she says, getting right to the point. “The boy.”

Betty holds back a sigh of her own. “I don’t need your approval, you know,” she points out, reaching for her own wine glass. She takes a drink and finds that it’s very, very good.

Ignoring what Betty’s said, Cheryl muses, “He’s… fitting. A good fit, for you. I mean, you could do better in this - ” she circles a finger in front of her face, “ - department, and his _wardrobe_...” She grimaces. “Well, it leaves much to be desired. But T.T. says he has good energy, and I have to agree.” She scrutinizes Betty. “I saw the two of you together, at my party. You looked happy.”

“I was. I _am_. I’m always happy when I’m with Jughead.”

Cheryl’s eyes narrow and she taps her fingers against her glass. “I’m sensing a _but_.”

“There is a _but_ ,” Betty admits, studying the crisp white tablecloth for a moment. “But it’s not about him, it’s about me.”

“And what is it?” Cheryl asks, her tone softening.

“I haven’t told him,” Betty says very quietly, “about my dad.”

“Oh, darling,” Cheryl says gently - and there it is, the reason Betty allows Cheryl to order her out to dinner without giving her any say in the matter: she understands. “He doesn’t seem like the type to judge you for something out of your control.”

Betty’s throat tightens. “He studies serial killers, Cher,” she whispers.

Cheryl purses her lips, absorbing this new piece of information. “I think that makes him even more likely to understand.” When Betty gives her head a little shake, she insists, “Really, B. Surely, he of all people would know that it’s not the family’s fault.”

Betty sips her wine, trying to ease the ache in her throat. “I never guessed. Not in all those years. I never even _suspected_ , not for a _second_.”

“You have to stop doing that,” Cheryl says sharply. “You know that’s not your fault, Betty. It wasn’t your job to be suspicious of your own father - you had no reason to be. And it’s the nature of who he was. It’s so rare that anyone knows. No one suspected about my father, either. And you don’t blame me for that, do you? For never guessing?”

“Of course I don’t,” Betty says. “Of course not. But it’s - Cheryl, you own what happened in your family, and that’s amazing, the way you can just… put it out there. It’s not your fault, and you know that. But it’s also… it’s different. You, and your mother, and Jason, of course - you were your father’s victims. But my father…” With a heavy sigh, she says, lowly, “My father didn’t murder in my family. He murdered in other people’s families.”

“That has nothing to do with you,” Cheryl says, crossing her arms, like she’s unwilling to tolerate Betty’s train of thought. “And you _were_ his victim, Betty. The fact that you're alive doesn't change that. You were a victim of his manipulation. And what about those creepy, coded letters he sent you?”

The tablecloth, the silverware, and the wine go blurry as Betty’s eyes fill with tears. “All that meant,” she whispers, “is that he thought I was like him.”

Cheryl reaches across the table and takes both of Betty’s hands, holding onto them until she’s able to blink the tears away. “Everything that your father - and my father - thought? It was _fucked_. It was _criminally insane_. It wasn’t real, B.” She looks Betty over for a moment, seeming to sense that this conversation might extend beyond her paygrade. “Why haven’t you brought this up at group?”

“Because… because I don’t need to talk it out,” Betty sighs. “I don’t think I do, anyway. I know what needs to happen. I need to tell Jughead. That’s just - that’s just a fact.” She gives her shoulders a small, sad shrug. “I’m just scared to.”

“I know,” Cheryl says gently. “I know.”

Their water reappears, and Cheryl releases Betty’s hands to pick up the menu and give him their order, rattling off several dishes. When he leaves with a brisk _of course, Ms. Blossom, right away_ , she turns back to Betty and gives her an encouraging smile.

“They have divine black velvet cake here,” she says. “And we are having dessert.”

 

 

The conversation with Cheryl lingers in Betty’s head all night, haunting her dreams and causing her to wake up feeling slightly disoriented. She’d texted with Jughead after dinner, mostly light banter, and he told her that he was rushing to meet a Friday night deadline and asked if she’s free to hang out on Saturday evening. She said yes, relieved that she’d have a couple days to sort her head out.

By the time her shift comes to an end, though, and she has some distance from the day before, she finds herself missing him. The gap between Thursday and Saturday suddenly feels quite long, and she wonders, as she takes off her apron, if she should go and knocked on his door. They didn’t sell out of cinnamon rolls - she could take two of those and two cups of tea and walk over to his apartment and offer him her company and a quick break from his work. There’d be an album playing on his record player and they could eat the cinnamon rolls sitting on his couch, and she could kiss sticky-sweet icing off his lips and press herself into him and finally let him peel her shirt up over her head -

But she knows that’s not what she should do. If she goes to see him, they should have the conversation she’s dreading, and that’s not a fair thing to drop onto someone in the middle of a stressful work week: _I really like you, here’s a cinnamon roll; by the way, my dad’s a murderer; okay, bye!_

She tosses the cinnamon rolls, puts her bus pass in her pocket, and locks the door of Shots! behind her. She’ll text Jughead when she gets home, tell him that she hopes he’s getting through his work okay, maybe send a gif of a cute animal, and then she’ll call her mother, so that she’s not all alone with her cruelest ghost.

 

 

tbc.


End file.
